FD4 hard drive upgrade question

[CrayPhish]

I have a FD4 with a small hard drive. Does anyone know the specs for these internal hard drives? Will any 2.5" notebook drive work? Is there an upper size limit? What's the largest drive anyone has used successfully in an FD4 or FD8? I noticed that fostex droped the FD line from their latest supported drives list on the website........luckily I had an older version saved.

[bbbmusic]

CrayPhish,

The drive in the FD-4 is soldered in and all that I have been able to learn, it should be attempted only by Fostex. I have an FD-4 with the small drive so, I bought the OrB Drive. It works great. Since then, I went and bought the VF-16 because you can swap out drives on it. But, I still use my Orb Drive for backups and wav file exports.
The Orb would be a better way to go than to swap a drive. It's too expensive and the top end capacity is still too small.
Later
Bruce

[CrayPhish]

I took it apart it's just a standard IDE connection, a no-brainer. You just have to be careful because when you unscrew the top and bottom of the FD4 there is very little wire length to work with between the two halfs. Since I already have a HD installed there's no additional soldering required, but you're correct in that if I didn't have one already it would not be something you could try at home since the non-HD version of the FD4 does not have the IDE port. Also, a large internal drive is much more cost effective than an ORB, although it does limit the overall record time.

So if anyone know's the overall capacity of the FD4 or has a large drive installed please let me know, THANKS.

[jet-rocker]

I haven't had to swap drives, I may have to soon. If the fd8/4 has had the hard drive installed by fostex, then you can swap disks I've heard.

I would email the bastards at fostex and ask what they'd recommend. They're kind of snotty but usually they get back to you. Take what they say with a grain of salt too.

I only had nightmares with the fd-8/orb combination. For more info on that search back a few months in this forum.

Good luck.

-Jett Rocker

[CrayPhish]

So what size drive did your FD8 come equipped with?

[jet-rocker]

Kind of a puny 2.14 I think, anyway. I sent the fd-8 back and fostex put it in for free, because I was upset with them for advertising the machine as media independent, which is really a joke.

They were unresponsive for months, but the final outcome was good. Maybe they're decent guys, who knows.

When I replace it, I'll probably only go as high as like a 6 gig. And if I'd need more space I'd just get another drive. Then I wouldn't chance losing everything in a drive failure or something. My Orb experience has left me jumpy.

-Jett Rocker.

[CrayPhish]

I bought mine used with less than 10 hours of use and it was advertised without a HD......so I figured I'd be going the orb route but when I got it it had a MASSIVE 270 meg HD installed. At least it has the connection-