Hard drive sizing discoveries

Both the CDROM and HD were shot on my recently acquired 4k (probably why it so cheap). Pulled them out and discovered that the previous owner(?) put a nasty pinch in the IDE cable during re-assembly which resulted in certain death for the devices.

Seemed easy enough to fix and went through spare drives to find another pair that worked. CDROM was OK, but was unable to get either the 200BG or 500GB drive to be recognized. Stuck an old 6Gb in and it worked and realized the issue. My DPS16 has a similar issue in which it would not recognize >127GB drives due the LBA address limitation. I checked to ensure there was an internal SCSI connector for the last ditch hope. Pulled out the spare (and rare) Akai IB-IDSC IDE to SCSI adapter designed for use with the S5000 and DPS12 for quick test to discover that it worked perfectly.


It may be worth noting that external USB drives do not suffer size limitation since USB (like SCSI) is not hampered by the LBA addressing.

Argh. One of the drawbacks of hanging an IDE drive off the SCSI bus, the "spin-down" is IDE specific. SCSI tosses the command out.

for ages I have been meaning to put an SSD drive in my MPC4000.

Silent, enormously faster loading times, and you don't feel so bad about wasted capacity, cos SSD drives quite often only come as 128GB size at the moment anyway!

yeah I got a 120g in mine,the factory drive gave me problems. man a couple of FELINE post! maybe he knows something about AKAI that we don't