wow, I might have got hotswap CF working with 3.11os

had a busy night, early days but this is looking good.

I've been helping someone local test MPC3000 CF drives and Acards so he could make cheap kits and sell on ebay. links were posted the other day.

Anyway, went round his yard earlier to get some CF cards to check for compatibility, and to test another Acard firmware (3.85, which DOES work btw...). While I was there he asked me to take a hot swap drive and test it, saying it was semi working with his ASR-X - I explained the usual, that I've NEVER heard of anyone getting one working with 3.11os, and that its mainly 2000xls that can handle this feature blah blah.

anyway, once other tests mentioned were done I tested the drive with 3 different disks, keeping the MPC on at all times and swapping between disks.

after minor mishap with 1 of the 3 cards that I had tried in my mac the other day (which worked out badly!!!) that seems to have issues saving on B partition no matter how many times I format (odd...) > hot swap actually seems to work!!!

Need you guys to tell me if I'm jumping the gun and getting excited over nothing....

Here are the tests I've done so far, all swapping was done while MPC was on, 3.11os, Acard (3.79+3.85 firmware tested):
sampled a single kick, assigned it, made very simple sequence. then on all 3 cards tried the same save options (each in their own partition), saved a sequence in a partition, a sound (the kick) in another partion, and all programs in another - did the same on all 3 disks. then deleted the sound from memory, changed card, reloaded the sound assigned it to the same pad, and the sequence played normally, deleted the sound again. swaped cards then loaded the sound from the 3rd card, assigned etc, that worked to.

turned off the MPC, turned on again, all cards still readable without turning off the MPC to change cards.

tried renaming the sound, and saving to different partition, then after clearing all sounds from memory loaded that from another card, assigned it and it worked from the sequence also.

I dunno - feels too good to be true - how does this sound to you lot???? any other tests worth doing to confirm all this??
good news if its a working hot swap with 3.11os right??

thats dope! given that Ronan is awol

i may cop one of these kits.....although the ones i saw posted before were over 100 quid which is ok i spose but aint that cheep? or are you referring to some else other than compactflashman2011....who has nothing to sell at the mo.....

I guess its not ultra cheap, think its the Acard price that bumps the price up - he doesn't buy in same bulk as scsiforsamplers prob did. But as said before with the price of Acards going up all the time I think its still a decent deal.

I am going to test it with bigger file sizes asap.

will try to post pics up too!! feel like I've discovered the 3.11os holy grail - I almost didn't bother testing it, spent ages telling him why I thought it 100% wouldn't work!!

apart from longer samples (only tried with 1 second stereo kick so far) - can anyone recommend any other things I should test?

after hearing this was impossible for years, I feel like I need to test my drive in as many ways as possible.

I thought the scsi protocol simply wouldn't allow hotswap? but then again I found a old post with JD+Rohan chatting about IDE adapters could be hotswap but they just were not very common.

SEED78 wrote:I thought the scsi protocol simply wouldn't allow hotswap? .

If SCSI couldn't allow hot swapping then you wouldn't be able to hotswap Zip disks (which you can) and sample cd's.

that makes sense, which is why I couldn't get my head around why people said you couldn't get a HS drive for 3.11.

you can understand my surprise? have you ever read a thread on here about anyone getting a HS CF working with 3.11os before? 99% of threads on here claim its impossible without 3.5os.

hot swapping is, as far as i understand it, judt using different cards without having to turn the machine off.....it looks as if you gots it sorted seed!! nice one!

INSIDE



OUTSIDE

SEED78 wrote:you can understand my surprise? have you ever read a thread on here about anyone getting a HS CF working with 3.11os before? 99% of threads on here claim its impossible without 3.5os.

No, but I rarely read MPC3000 threads as I dont have one.
I never doubted you could hotswap with 3.11 os though, as I've never seen anyone complain they couldn't hotswap a zip disk and SCSI for samplers used to sell both hotswapable and non hotswapable CF readers for it.

I completely understand the logic bro, thats not even an issue.

but its true that 99% of posts on here claim it can't be done AT ALL for the 3000 in the non detailed way the posts are written. I must have read all relevant threads by now, did a ton of research on here before getting the 3000.

even on the scsiforsamplers.com site when that was up I'm pretty sure they only sold HS Spyrus's for 3.5os 3000s only rest were NOT hot swap and that guy was one of the few experts we had on the subject. so I just assumed it couldn't be done so didn't try random drives out, most 3000 users have prob done the same - who wants to buy stuff they think won't work.

I only discovered recently that it was because those specific HS drives themselves were hard to get, not that it was the 3000's os blocking the function. the fact that 3.5os makes this easier (Spyrus will not work on 3.11os, but will on 3.5os) gives the impression that 3.11os is at fault, and NO posts I've seen on here say otherwise.

how many 3000s have you seen on your travels or online that have a hot swap and 3.11os? not many or none I'm guessing, because people are not bothering to try because they are told its not being done.

based on all the above its only natural to be surprised and happy to have hot swap - and I wanted to share my find so peeps have a chance to get it working themselves if they've had the wrong impression like me... thats all.

What other cards did you try ?
I've been having trouble tracking down more of those Lexar pro's.