anyone using an SD card instead of a 2.5"HD?

2.5" IDE to SD card adaptors are quite inexpensive and I'm thinking more durable than a laptop drive with the bashing an MPC would get

I'm thinking 32GB SD card should be good for my needs.

Haven't got the HD adaptor kit yet tho I'm guessing I'd need it first.

I installed a 16 gig CF card in the place where the 2.5" drive was supposed to go. So yeah, it can work... With CF cards at least.

This is in my 2500, but the machines are close enough...
~Steve

I have the parts, just haven't stuck it in there yet. Conceptually its the same as sticking a CF card/adapter in there. Have a look at the solid state hard drive thread above.

Okay I stuck it in last night. Just an installation note, it takes a while for the MPC to boot up when you first install the card adapter and the card. Don't panic. After you format the card, boot times return to normal.

I bought a 32gb SDHC card, and that basically went without a hitch, except that when using the USB interface, the card was noticeably slower than the hard drive I had in there. I didn't test out the internal loading and saving speeds (mainly because with the USB interface so slow, the upgrade would be useless to me) but I was able to save a sample to the card and reload it.

Fortunately I had a spare 8gb SD (not HC) card laying around, so I stuck that in, formatted it, and tested out the USB interface. Same exact speed as the hard drive when transferring samples to and from the computer. (Which confirms that its the 1k's USB interface that's the bottleneck.) Anyhow, I think I'm gonna go with that for the time being.

Just in case you aren't sure what to buy, two suggestions: avoid SDHC and make sure the adapter you buy meets the requirements stated in the sticky thread above. (It must be BOOTABLE, have NO DRIVERS NEEDED, and it MUST HAVE ALL 44 PINS and it can NOT REQUIRE A POWER ADAPTER). This is a link to what I bought:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... MEWNX%3AIT
)

Okay so I put it to the test last night:

pros:much snappier than a standard hard drive for browsing sounds. Loading speed is no faster or slower. USB mounting works exactly as it did with the hard drive.

cons: saving takes much longer than it did with the hard drive. It took probably about 3-4 times as long to save a new project with a modest number of samples.

Overall I think I can live with it for now, but I'm going to probably end up putting a CF adapter in there.

What speed/class SD/SDHC card did you put in there? If you've got a class 2/4 I'm not surprised it's so bad. If you've got a class 8/10 I'd be a bit more worried that you got ripped off.

To answer your question directly, I don't know off hand and the SD cards (and my MPC) are home. However I don't think the save time issue above is directly related to the speed or quality of the card. As I stated, every other throughput test (with the SD card) came out just fine (in other words, no issues with loading samples into memory or transferring samples to and from my Mac with USB), it's just saving from memory that's noticeably slower. That, to me points to some sort of incompatibility with the IDE to SD adapter and the MPC's drive controller.

Now with the SDHC card, I think its a combination things. Maybe the IDE to SD adapter doesn't like SDHC cards??? Maybe the MPC's drive controller doesn't??? That card is noticeably slower in all writing tests (writing from internal memory and from USB interface), but it works pretty much just fine in the other direction.

Anyway, if it were the speed of the card that was the bottleneck, then you would expect slower read times AND write times (when compared to the hard drive), correct? In essence, both cards (SD and SDHC) match the hard drive when it comes to loading a sample into memory (reading).

But keep in mind, these are all eyeball tests, I have too much living left to do to sit there with a stopwatch like some overclocking geek or something...

Not really worried about getting ripped off... I paid $26 for the 32gb SDHC, and about the same for the 8gb SD card a couple years ago.

Unfortunately the read speeds and write speeds on any Flash media are wildly different. They aren't even comparable in most cases and writes are typically at least half the speed of reads. For random writes, or small file writes you can kill your performance due to how most flash storage is implemented.

I'm not trying to debunk your theory that the adapter may be bad, but if I had to take a guess it is that the SD card just has horrible write performance to begin with. If you're working with lots of small files (and especially programs/track/sequence data) it is probably just overwhelming what the SD card is capable of.

Anyway... off to a party. Later y'all!