Will this Zip drive work?

http://boulder.craigslist.org/ele/5249220376.html

I guess there's really no way of knowing without taking a look at the back right?

My MPC, other than for sequencing, is pretty much just a glorified drum machine. I have about 200 go-to drum sounds loaded onto one CF card right now and because of the 256 file limit and the fact that you have to save duplicate sounds in other folders when working on projects, it doesn't give me much room to put anything else on the card without deleting stuff, so I can really only work on one project at a time and have to delete it after I've finished it. And I put all my drum samples onto a card to keep me from having to turn on & hook up my drum machines and sample them every time I work on something new, now I just don't have room for anything else on it.

I don't have a hot-swappable reader, so it's not like I can put my card in and pull the few sounds I'll need and then save them onto a new card...which I really wish I could do because I bought about 40 CF cards for super cheap, so I basically have more than enough storage space to go around. And I guess the MPC's only internal memory is the flash ROM? Which is only 8mb and certainly not enough to save all the samples I have. I know Zip drives are outdated technology, but if I could just put all those drum samples on a Zip instead, it would finally be free to use all the CF cards I have for other projects. So the other question is, if you have a Zip drive hooked up through external SCSI, will the MPC still be able to read my internal CF card reader as well? Or can it only read one or the other after it's booted up?

I just want to put all my go-to drum samples onto a Zip so I can pull from that and be free to save everything else onto my CF cards and actually use my MPC for it's sampling & chopping capabilities...

That zip drive will work. But you need an adaptor for the scsi cable, or just a different cable. The MPC will be able to read from both the CF reader and the zip drive after switching the device in the load/save menu. But you'll have to load everything into the ram. You won't be able to copy samples from one drive to the other. You may want to buy a USB zip drive and copy everything with your computer instead. In order to overcome the limitations of the mpc only reading 256 files, you should partition your CF cards when formatting on the mpc.

Actually, I found something even better on Craigslist and for only $9: A new 1 GB SCSI Jaz drive still sealed up in the factory package. I most likely won't be using a whole gig because I'm only going to be putting those 200 or so drum samples on it, but from what I understand, Jaz drives are less prone to failure than Zip drives and for the price I paid, it won't matter much anyway if it ever craps out on me

Now I just need to hop on eBay and grab some disks.

I'm sure it would be a long time before the Jaz drive gives you any issues. For $9 you can't go wrong. Plus you won't need an adaptor for that cable. Just make sure to stay away from used disks. You'll still find new old stock on ebay at reasonable prices.

JAZ 1GB & 2GB Disc drives > Zip 750, 250 & 100mb Disc drives