Thumb Drives

Hi, I am on the Newegg site and i want to buy some thumb drives for my MPC4000 but I want to ask some questions first.
I have used thumb drives on my Z4 and my MPC4000 in the past but they were only 2 gig of storage and they were older ones from 2008 that I had sitting unused in my house.
On the newegg website I see some newer thumb drives that are 16 gig and say usb3.0.
Has anyone tried these newer larger gig thumb drives and confirmed they work?
Do they work any faster?

I have read that the 3.0 is supposed to fit the regular usb sockets.
If it can work then I will put all of my samples on one thumb drive.

USB Specification: USB 3.0
Read Speed: up to 100 MB/s
Write Speed: up to 25 MB/s
Dimensions: 61.8mm x 18.7mm x 10.7mm

Thanks,
Ian

I don't know about USB 3 but I use a 16gb Verbatim drive similar to this...





It works perfectly and is small enough to stay in the drive and not get in the way.

Don't know about 16GB but I have a 8GB Sandisk similar to the pic above and it works fine. I also have a USB card adapter with a 32GB SD card as the host and I have no problems.....

I have read that the 3.0 is supposed to fit the regular usb sockets.
usb3 fits all prior usb1 and usb2 ports. Physical difference is the pinouts inside the plug/connector.



USB Specification: USB 3.0
Read Speed: up to 100 MB/s
Write Speed: up to 25 MB/s
Dimensions: 61.8mm x 18.7mm x 10.7mm
Doesn't matter what usb3 specs are. 4k usb data can only travel as fast as the 4k lets it. Remember 4k was made before usb 3 so it's impossible for it to reach usb3 speeds/specs.

A honda spree engine in a ducati body is still a honda spree.

I can 2nd that. Use two sandisk 16gb micro small usb similar to the one showing in picture. Any capacity should work. Also ssd external usb should be fine? Interested to find out....

just wanted to throw this out there.

i recently found 64gb thumb drives on amazon and they are cool, regular sized though.

i think i got 2 for like 100 bucks or something like that.

that is a really good price Damien.
I am here thinking about taking out the HDD and putting in Compact flash but the usb may be the move at that price.
Peace
ian

PS "anyone know which CF card is best?"

Is SSD faster than usb flash? Was looking at a 60gig disk its affordable.

I wouldn't mind hearing about the speed also. I don't mind how fast the MPC is now, and I am not so pressed about the gig size. What I do want is quiet, lighter weight and cheap.
I went to Microcenter (computer store) and I saw lots of used and refurbished IDE HDD at various prices($9.99 - $30) and the only foreseeable problem is that HDD can be loud.
Compact flash is a bit expensive for very little memory. (Funny to complain about $35-$50 cards after spending so much more on devices)
USB seems to be the better way to go.
In my Akai Z4 I unplugged the HD. I don't like the noise and vibration, but I liked the size. Now that Ak.sys is working for me I will probably take everything off the hard drive leave it on the desktop and have a 16 or 32 gig thub drive that I will only load half way with samples.

Has anyone made a video or taken pictures of the exact adapters needed in order to use a SATA SSD? I tried doing some research but then stopped because I began to wonder if it is worth it since SSD is expensive and thumb drives are so cheap.

Cheers,
Ian

i don't notice too much of a difference between saving/loading to/from internal hd and external cf card in terms of speed.

if swapping out the internal hd was a breeze i'd be all over it but with flash storage being so cheap i just don't see the point. my hd is hardly noisy and has made it 10+ years. maybe it's about to pop and maybe it'll just keep on keepin' on but so far so good.

just my two cents.

- jim

e9000k wrote:I can 2nd that. Use two sandisk 16gb micro small usb similar to the one showing in picture. Any capacity should work. Also ssd external usb should be fine? Interested to find out....

I think the only thing to be careful with when using an external USB drive is the power consumption if the drive is USB powered. The USB standard provides for 0.5 amps max current, but I don't know if the MPC 4000 would be comfortable with that over the long term.

Personally I would use a compact flash drive or some of the thumb drives mentioned in this thread before a USB SSD. That's mainly because I'm paranoid about burning out the USB port on the MPC.

One of the SSDs that I have pulls 0.6 amps continuously as I think it's some kind of military spec drive designed for continuous fast access. This drive would have to be mains powered to use on a USB socket. It works fine inside the MPC using a 2.5 to 3.5 converter (44 pin to 40 pin plus molex power socket).

The drive I use inside my MPC is a STEC SATA 60Gb SLC Flash SSD via a Kingwin ADP-06 SATA to IDE adapter. Most SSDs are 2.5 size so you need an adapter mounting plate as well. I wanted a plate that would allow the SSD to bolt onto one side so the cable wasn't being pulled, but I couldn't find one that was drilled for mounting from below (they all seemed to have threaded holes at the sides which is no use for the existing MPC mounting plate).

There are legions of cheap SATA to IDE adapters on ebay, but I tried one of these cheapies and lost the ability to access my CD drive, so there's some compatibility issues. This could have been due to incorrect setting of the hard drive to master, but the changing the jumpers on the adapter didn't seem to help.

The Kingwin works, and I'm guessing that a quality adapter such as the Startech adapter would work as well (although the Startech appears to use a floppy type power connector rather than a full size molex so it needs a floppy to molex power lead - may be included not sure).

I would say that the IDE SSD was faster than the SATA drive with the adapter, but neither of them are that quick, certainly not a great deal faster than my old Akai S1100 saving onto a compact flash card over SCSI (although the samples are probably smaller with S1100). When you have 512Mb in the MPC you don't worry too much about how big your samples are.

Good post MPCDawk....concise, thorough and well detailed.

Cheers,
Ian

No worries, I'm really into getting some modern SATA drives working on the MPC so they can hopefully keep going into the future. Got side tracked lately with a compact flash drive on the real vintage samplers.

One thing I forgot to mention - a massive plus with using an SSD inside the MPC is no spin up time. They're available to save or load virtually a second after you hit the button. Oh yeah, and totally silent as well.