Roland suggests that only their own CD writer is useable with this machine. They also say that a zip drive can be used for data backup. My question is this:
Does the zip drive compress the data in a backup situation, or am I limited to the same MB per audio minute ratio as the recording deck? Has anyone used a Jazz drive to archive data on a VSS machine? I have a full hard drive and I'm not ready to mixdown yet - any sugesstions would be helpfull!
Will any SCZI hard drives work as a backup drive too? How much drive space do I need to backup a 3GB hard drive? Sorry for all the questions - I'm in a pickle !


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Uncle Dave

Dave, I don't have experiences with HD recording units, but if you can attach the scsidevices of the Roland to an scsi chain I would hook it on your PC. I know Fran has a setup like that, so you could ask him how he did that, as your scsi card and your Roland will both wanna have control over the HD units. There's a way to solve it, but I cannot recall this by head.
Fred

Fred,
I don't have a SCZI PC - it's an IDE hard drive I think. Fran uses a laptop with a PCMCIA SCZI card. This won't work for my situation. At least, I don't think it will. I'm waiting to hear from someone who performs backups on a Roland VS series recorder. This is a pretty specific task.

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Uncle Dave

Dave,
I went to the Rolandsite to see the specs.
It says standard scsiport for external data devices, which means I would do following;
Buy a SCSI harddisk standalone-unit and just hook it up.
This way you do not need to hassle with PC settings/conflicts which might arise.
If you do not have a cdwriter yet, ofcourse the Roland cdwriter is a good option.
My opinion only;
Stay away from zip drives!
There's allways a problem and capacity/price comparison is bad as well, compared to Harddisks or cdrecordables.
Fred