Recommended Card Readers

word of advice when installing the drive: be sure to plug the power cable into the motherboard with the red cable towards the right towards the CF drive. You can fry your CF reader accidentally, since the cables that come with the MPC-Stuff kit are easy to invert.

The best card reader I ever had in my XL was the internal Microtech SCSI PCD-47B card reader. It was like having 3 hard drives (3 SCSI IDs) to use ATA type II, CompactFlash, SmartMedia, and PCMCIA hard disks or a PCMCIA adapter. I never had any freezes or corrupted data the whole time I used it with OS1.14c. Since 2006, I've used an Kingston 8GB Compact Flash card in it with 9 partitions of 875MB and it worked flawlessly as hot swappable with fast load and save speeds.
The downside to the -47B now is that they are terribly hard to find and because of this they are expensive as ****! My first -47B card reader was $32 off of eBay (2005) and my second was $61 (2007). Now them suckas go for $200 to $600!

I'm curious to buy the Artmix SCSI Raizinmonster CompactFlash card reader for $129 to see if it has the same CF card capacity and speeds as the Microtech card readers.

I too was curious about the raizenmonster and thought about buying but got spooked when users were reporting all sorts of problems with the mpc3000 and I am not sure of other samplers out there. But if someone can confirm the raizenmonster works with the mpc2000 or mpc2000xl, then that would be great. would hate to buy this all the way from japan only to find out it does not work.

I went ahead and bought online the Raizenmonster SCSI card reader. I'll report back when I get it and try it out on the XL.

I got the RaizenMonster in the post yesterday and will report back on it when I get a chance to install it.

I also bought a Addonics/StarTech CF IDE card reader that people rave about and IMHO it sucks. It's too finicky with different popular name brand CF cards I tried to use on it. I don't care much about hot swapping but I do need to make sure the card reader accepts different brand name CF cards from clients/friends.
I guess I'm spoiled by my Microtech SCSI card readers because they will read & write to every CF/SD card I got and throw in it.

I found this info on the Chicken Systems website about SCSI card readers...
http://www.chickensys.com/news/20150811/scsicard.php

JUKE 179r wrote:I found this info on the Chicken Systems website about SCSI card readers...
http://www.chickensys.com/news/20150811/scsicard.php

Thats strange how this article which was just written states that the Raizinmonster and Fuzinmonster are not hot-swappable. But the ebay listings and Artmix's site state that they are hot-swappable. All the posts here on the forums (particularly the MPC60/3000 subforum) mention them being hot-swappable. I'm not sure if the issue only exists with Ensoniq samplers, since the author has only tested them, and not any Akai samplers. But anyway, let us know how you make out with the Raizinmonster when you install it in the 2000XL.

Hey I also caught that just now. I read the ebay listing description on the raizinmonster card reader and then I read the Chicken Systems link and the listiing says hot-swap and then the other says NO hot-swap. So it is not clear which one is correct and I wonder if it may differ on sampler used maybe?

But please do let us know how the raizenmonster behaves with the mpc2000xl. As I would be interested in buying one for my mpc2000xl and mpc2000. Your input is really appreciated. Thanks.

According to the topic in the MPC60/3000 forum, it's been reported that the Raizinmonster is infact hot-swappable. However, one member posted that a specific card that was tested would not hot-swap. The info provided seems a bit vague since it's not clear why that issue exists. I'm not sure if the issue exists only on the MPC3000 or if there's something else going on that couldve been overlooked. To be on the safe side, I would avoid buying the card mentioned in that topic. But I would encourage anyone who has that specific card in their possesion to test it out and see if they get the same results. I never expected to read about specific cards not being hot-swappable. So this goes beyond my knowledge, and I'm curious to learn more.
http://www.mpc-forums.com/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=172750&start=32

Now I am concerned about this raizenmonster card reader after reading the thread suggested by distortedtekno . It just seems there were too many reported problems from error messages to using different cf cards. It is not clear. It sounds like its performance is no where close to the Microtech as Juke 179r mentioned. And then I want to know if it is hotswap or not.

I am keeping an open mind and will wait til Juke 179r post his experiences with the raizenmonster card reader. He seems to be very experienced with using card readers so his opinion is valued.

For now I will sit on the fence and wait n see.

I haven't fully tested out the SCSI RaizenMonster other than plugging it up to my 2000XL to verify that it works.
I also quickly verified with 4 different CF cards that it is Hot Swappable. I used a 256MB (Sandisk), 2GB (Sandisk), 8GB (Kingston 166x) and 16GB (Kingston Ultimate 600x) cards. When I swapped out the cards while the MPC was on, there was a 6-10 second pause to find the card but after that it was back to making beats.
*** BTW... I was using OS1.2 for this. I'll try OS1.14c later ***
I'll have to go more in depth with a CF card reader shoot-out but that won't be for a while. My day job and completing my BS degree at night is kicking my ass at 45 years old!

StarTech (IDE), No Name? ? ? (IDE) , Microtech PCD-47B (SCSI) & RaizenMonster (SCSI) CF card readers

Kingston Ultimate 600x-16GB CF card read by RaizenMonster on MPC2000XL

Thanks for supplying all that info, Juke. Good to see those results. I'm keeping the idea of buying one on the back burner incase I decide not to go the SD route.

Also thanks to Juke for furnishing his initial impression of the raizenmonster. But I am curious to know how complete testing goes and to reveal any possible errors that may surface. If anyone else has fully tested the raizenmonster on their mpc2000xl or mpc2000, please share details. I will hold off buying anything for now.

Thanks again Juke.

No problem fellas. I plan to video record my tests but I got to find the time to do it and get a better camera. I edit my iPhone5 movies on iMovie then they get all **** up when uploading to YouTube. But that's another story...

Another note... The 2000XL I quickly tried the RaizenMonster on has some dodgy tact switches, added different LEDs and I was in the process of adding an internal 9GB HD. So these factors might have caused the 6-10 second lag time. Or it could have been the OS but who knows... More to come...

JUKE 179r wrote:I found this info on the Chicken Systems website about SCSI card readers...
http://www.chickensys.com/news/20150811/scsicard.php

Here is Chicked Systems update to their SCSI memory card news from 2 weeks ago. They got into a little more detail about the RaizenMonster and the SCSI2SD card readers...
http://www.chickensys.com/news/20150827/scsicard.php