Silverfish Posted April 13, 2006 Report Share Posted April 13, 2006 Hi folks. This one is really, really OT. I've had a roland sp808 for a while now (it was my first piece of real gear), and I don't think I could ever part with it. The problem is that Roland thought 100mb zip drives were a technology that would not soon be overtaken. I've searched for a number of replacements, among them a compact flash drive (unsuccesful), a larger zip drive (known to work, but only partially solves the problem), and using a hard drive. The sp808 is very similar to the VS series mixers roland released, and a number of folks have successfuly used all of the above to bypass their limited zip drives. Roland made a model similar to the 808 for video production, the A6. Rather than having a zip drive, it had a small hard drive (6Gb?). This would seem to indicate that a hard drive will work. I haven't tried it yet, but a few other ideas popped into my head:1. Is it at all possible to emulate zip drive firmware on a hard drive? The goal being to trick the 808 into thinking there's still just a zip drive.um... I guess that was my only question for you wonderful programming-type people. I appreciate any info you may have on obliterating this confounded zip drive (although, truthfully, I should be thankful the zip drive still works). Thanks, Silverfish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fluke Posted April 13, 2006 Report Share Posted April 13, 2006 Which connector does the larger Zip drive which works use? External Zip (100MB) drives came in 3 formats: Parallel Port, SCSI and Parallel+SCSI. Internal ones came in IDE and possibly SCSI as well.If it is an IDE drive, a hard drive should just drop in. Or a Compact Flash card with a CF to IDE adapter. The only thing to be concerned about is the maximum size drive supported. The first of the IDE limits was ~540MB. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Silverfish Posted April 13, 2006 Author Report Share Posted April 13, 2006 The internal zip uses an IDE/ATAPI connector. I tried the CF to IDE converter with a 512MB card but had no success. Good thing they're really cheap. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to test a small hard drive. Thanks, Silverfish Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
stryd_one Posted April 13, 2006 Report Share Posted April 13, 2006 Definitely... I'd recommend trying a few different ages though, because a small UDMA5 drive might not work, where a small PIO drive may, etc... Will depend on the vintage of the controller. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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