S2800 - 3000 IDE Compact Flash Card Upgrade?

Hows it going everyone, I've just spent 20 mins searching the forum for info regarding the Akai S2800 and cannot find anything about this (Tons for the MPC 2000 though obviously)

The common upgrade with the MPC2000 was swapping out the IDE Floppy drive for a cheap Startech or Microtech CF card reader..

Seeing as the S2800 and 3000 dont have internal SCSI and I dont happen to have an SCSI card, And the gotek floppy emulators seem to suck, Has anyone tried upgrading the floppy drives with these cheap eBay IDE CF readers?

Im guessing a 40pin female IDE one would do the trick?

Please let me know if im being stupid here, Also I notice I can install a hard drive in the S2800 alongside the floppy drive, can this be an IDE CF adapter perhaps?

All the mods I can find online are for the S3000XL and 3200XL which have internal SCSI, Th 2800 and 3000 do not.

THANKS!

You're mistaking the MPC 2000 for the 2000 XL. The original 2000 does not have an internal IDE connector to utilize a Startech IDE CF card reader.

My S2800/S3000 happens to have internal SCSI ONLY. It is all dependent on whether or not you have a 50 pin connector soldered to the SCSI card to determine if you can install an internal SCSI device to your sampler.

Mine looks similar to this:



Note that there is a 50 pin SCSI connector on this card.

In some cases there are S2800 and S3000's without any SCSI card installed. You can find them on eBay though. A S3000 scsi card will fit in an S2800 just fine. Now if you dofind a SCSI card that still does not have an internal 50 pin SCSI connector, then your choice is to either solder one to the card or go the easier route and get this when it is back in stock:

https://store.inertialcomputing.com/product-p/scsi2sd-v5.5.htm

You can connect this directly to the back of the S2800 / S3000 SCSI port although you will require a DB25 to CN50 gender changer adapter or a short SCSI cable of equivalent orientation to the same job.

And just to reiterate - the MPC 2000, the entire Akai rack sampler S series do not have active IDE ports in them whatsoever.

Thanks for taking the time to post mate, I appreciate it.. God knows this is a boring subject to bang on about lol

Yes it was a MPC2000XL I had that I did the Microtech jobby with you are right...

My S2800 doesnt have the SCSI card, I shall look at picking one up but they look like they are about £50+ so that will be a massive plan B..

Have you any thoughts about wether I can just switch out the floppy drive for a IDE CF drive? Like the Startech or Microtech ones?

And lasty, What about an IDE zip drive? Can I just switch one of those instead of the floppy on a S2800 ?

Thanks richie!

You could swap out the disk drive for a Gotek USB drive to get an floppy drive emulator pretty easily. The floppy drive connector and IDE are two completely different cables and protocols. You're not going to be able to swap out the floppy drive directly for an IDE, SCSI, or other. You're not going to be able to swap out the floppy for much else without having the SCSI card.

With the SCSI adaptor, you can get into a lot more options, but I still think you're barking up the wrong tree considering going from SCSI to IDE to CF/Zip/etc... while it may work, you're adding in more complication which can result in more failure points to triage in the future, more places for things to outright fail, and places for incompatibility or support problems. You could end up investing in a bunch of gear trying to get things to work, but it just might not work well.

At the end of the day, the SD2SCSI is a solid solution, and whether you mount it internally or externally, I suspect this will give you the broadest and easiest way to get a modern drive format to work with your MPC.

If I already had the SCSI card I would for sure go that route as it does seem to be the most well documented and all around best, But If you add the price of getting a SCSI card and the SCSI to SD adapter it becomes unworkable for me, I simpley dont need it that much, I'll stick to floppies basically.

But the thought of being able to swap out the IDE floppy with this IDE SD adapter:

https://www.startech.com/en-eu/hdd/35baycf2ide

Makes it totally worthwhile, These go for £24 so it would be a steal.

Have you investigated the Gotek usb floppy emulator drives? Not sure that this one is programmed correctly for your needs, but something like Gotek SFR1M44-U100 should work out okay for you.

Devontodetroit wrote:Have you any thoughts about wether I can just switch out the floppy drive for a IDE CF drive? Like the Startech or Microtech ones?

And lasty, What about an IDE zip drive? Can I just switch one of those instead of the floppy on a S2800 ?

Thanks richie!

Again, the S2800 does not have an IDE connector so it is incapable of utilizing any IDE devices period, full stop.

The Floppy drive is not an IDE device, it is floppy device which does not use IDE whatsoever.

Your only option at this point is to go the route of a Gotek floppy emulator, or purchase a SCSI compatible card for your S2800 and then to the right thing in life and get a SCSI2SD. At least with the SCSI2SD you'd get 4x the file storage (so 540x4) due to the fact it can emulate 4 SCSI devices at once.

Devontodetroit wrote:But the thought of being able to swap out the IDE floppy with this IDE SD adapter:

Like I said a few times now - IDE devices and your S2800 = NO.