Tascam MX2424 hard drive woes and weird output noise

[witzendoz]

I have tried a couple of different free Fat32 formatting softwares, and the drive does not work on the MX, everyone that has got it going has used Disk Director, I am waiting for mine to arrive and if I get it working I will update with success or failure LOL.

I think it has something to do with formatting without any partitions or registry allocation on the drive (I stand to be corrected on this). I am also hoping that disk director may be able to fix some scsi drives that I bought that cannot be seen by the mx or my PC. Even though they spin up, another formatting problem maybe?

There was a place selling the ACARD cards on ebay very cheap before christmas, I bought 2, but they are out of stock now.

Alan.

 

[carausius]

I bought one of the cheaper AEC-7732 cards for £36 with import tax & postage, they are not exactly the same as the £129 AEC-7730A versions as I think they are meant to attach to a DVD writer or similar but mine works fine. Both 160mb transfer rates according to the specs.

I just had to remove 1/4" from the metal frame that covers the caddy to get a good fit with the card & my removable caddy which is an Icy Box, however the Icy Box is total rubbish, flimsy & some of the attachment screws have already fallen off & the lid won't fit properly. I'll going to try one of the other HDD caddies that Strados mentioned.

The 32 versions do the job but they now seem to be almost as expensive as the 30 models unless that Ebay seller has more available for the old price???

The only difference that I can notice is that the SATA drives are very quiet compared to the SCSI! The SATA HDD is also cooler.

 

[witzendoz]

I bought one of the cheaper AEC-7732 cards for £36 with import tax & postage, they are not exactly the same as the £129 AEC-7730A versions as I think they are meant to attach to a DVD writer or similar but mine works fine. Both 160mb transfer rates according to the specs.

Thats exactly the model I got, I got the MX to see the drive as a SCSI device but it could not see the drive capacity or mount it. My Disk Director software turned up last night so now I just need the time to try it out with the formatting, it's just arrived at a busy point in the studio bookings so I will try when I can.

I also plan to re-visit all the scsi drives I could not get to work using Disk Director, I will also give an update of this when I can as it may be a solution to the non-mounting SCSI issues.

Alan.

 

[carausius]

Alan, when you get the chance try wiping by all the disk contents in ADD, then add the volume in ADD, then use the MX2424 to initialise the disk.

That's the way I got it working properly,

Both my disks WD / Maxtor 80G worked when I used Acronis Disk Director to totally wipe all the previous content. I then added new volumes in Disk Director & then initialised the disks in the MX2424 .

When I previously did the FAT32 format in ADD the disks didn't mount properly, they did work for a week or so but then stopped mounting. ADD had also put another small partition 1-2MB or so, that I didn't notice at the time, I'm wondering if this was a problem for the MX2424?

 

[carausius]

What I found over time was that my Icy Box SATA enclosure / caddy could once in a while refuse to mount the SATA disk when connected to the back of the caddy. I found the best way to get the drive working without any issues was to connect the Acard card directly to the back side of the disk drive instead of the caddy being inbetween them.

I also had sometimes forgoten to turn the caddy key to connect up the caddy to the disk enclosure which I was supposed to do to get it working properly, this obviously caused some of my problems.

I bought a 22pin (15+7) male to female SATA cable




to make the connection between the Acard SCSI to SATA converter instead of my previous method.

Plus I also bought another cheap Icy Box enclosure / caddy to test out as I can't find any of the separate removable caddies on sale, also bought a Seagate Barracuda 80G drive. If I get some extra caddies I can try out different makes & sizes of disk drives although I'll probably stick with 80G 7200rpm 8mb cache for now!

 

[witzendoz]

I have never got this working, and then I got too busy to try again. I think my problem is that the drives are large (500gig) or just not suitable and they just don't want to work. I have done everything suggested on this thread. I was going to look around on the net a smaller drive to try, if I can get it to work once at least I will know that it is set up right then research the drive issue.

Meanwhile I picked up some new scsi drives on the net that all worked first time LOL, not always the case.

Alan.

 

[carausius]

Hi Alan, so far I've only used 80GB SATA drives, 8mb cache, 7200 speed.

I just use the internal SCSI Quantum Atlas 73GB that came with the MX2424 for backup (switched off when not in use as it's noisy!) I managed to format that to FAT32 from the front panel of the MX2424 as it wouldn't work with smart copy from & to the SATA / FAT32 drives but I don't know the reason why? SDII HTFS Mac files maybe formated by an older operating system as I have 3.12 on the MX?

If I see a cheap used 500GB drive I'll buy it & try to get it working!

 

[witzendoz]

I managed to format that to FAT32 from the front panel of the MX2424 as it wouldn't work with smart copy from & to the SATA / FAT32 drives but I don't know the reason why? SDII HTFS Mac files maybe formated by an older operating system as I have 3.12 on the MX?

SDII files were created by the drive being formatted as a mac drive, if you were copying files from a mac formatted drive to a FAT32 drive I think the MX tries to convert the files from SDII to broadcast wav. There was something about later operating systems and mac format, but I can't remember as I never used SDII or mac format ever.

Alan.

 

[carausius]

I've always used FAt32 for Mac or windows so probably messed up somewhere! Anyway the spare SCSI drive is now fat32, perfect for extra backups.

I've got an extra Icy Box caddy in the post & put another SATA drive in there (Seagate Barracuda 7200 8mb cache), this one formated & initialized very quickly using the front panel controls on the MX2424. Recorded all tracks for 10mins fine.

I'm looking out for some deals on larger SATA drives to try out next.

BTW Alan are your 500GB drives WD? Stratos mentioned using WD800JD, WD4000AAKS and WD5000AAKS as recommended by Acard?

 

[witzendoz]

Funny, I always thought that if the drive was formatted mac it would automatically record SDII, if it was formatted Fat32 it would record B-Wav.

When I get a chance I will have a look at which sata drives I got, I must admit that I did not take much notice. When I get a chance ....... sigh!

Alan.

 

[witzendoz]

Hay guys, have a look at this thread, http://www.tascamforums.com/threads/mx-24242-with-ssd-harddrive.4178/
Suggestion of using SSD's, I was wondering if any of you guys that have the sata thing working already could give it a go, the small 60gig ssd's are getting cheap(ish) now.

I would revisit this whole thing if the SSD drive thing worked.

Alan.