Zip 100 blows.

H

HFFritz

New member
I was interested in archiving recordings from my D824, so I felt lucky when I saw an Iomega Zip100 in the back (junk) room at the office. I spent $15.00 on a SCSI cable that would connect the two and scrounged up a couple of disks. Everything hooked up nicely and I formatted a couple of disks in no time. When I went to save a program to the Zip, the display indicated how many disks would be required: 24. Granted, it was a rather long song, so I looked through the others to find ANY song that would fit on a single 100MB disk. None. I imagine that since I'm recording at 24bit/96kHz the files will be rather large, but figuring they'd be half the size at 48kHz, it would still be inadequate.

Lesson learned: Skip the Zip100. The Zip 250 would only be marginally better. Only the 1GB and 2GB Jaz drives would be suitable.

Questions: I notice that the Fostex D5 DAT recorder is becoming more affordable and it is capable of archiving as well. Does anyone out there use one for archiving? Does it require more than one tape per 4 minute, 6-8 track song? Does anyone archive using the Fostex CD burner?
 
Well, think about it: 3 bytes-per-word x 96kHz x 60seconds gives you 17.3 megabytes per track minute. Your four minute, 8 track song would therefore be 553 megabytes, plus any file-format overhead from FDMS3 or WAV.

It'd fit on a CDR (barely!) or a DVD-RAM. The DAT tapes can hold over a gigabyte, so they'd hold a song or two. But backing up directly from the Fostex is a pain in the ass.

I fly my tracks from the Fostex to my DAW, via lightpipe, and then back up automatically every night to Exabyte (8mm) tapes over the ethernet. I gave up very rapidly on any of the "native" D-series backup mechanisms... I track to the Fostex, because it is stone reliable- but then I copy the data to the DAW, and manipulate it there. Anyway, now you know why a lot of us still sample at 44.1 kHz: 7.9 Mb/track minute is a lot easier to stomach in terms of storage costs.

But save the Zip drive. It's the best way to upload firmware updates to the unit, if and when Fostex releases them.
 
Sure! There's a lot of other useful Fostex info here that will become more accessible after the first of the month, as well (when Dragon moves the site to its own server)- stay tuned.
 
Originally posted by HFFritz
Questions: I notice that the Fostex D5 DAT recorder is becoming more affordable and it is capable of archiving as well. Does anyone out there use one for archiving? Does it require more than one tape per 4 minute, 6-8 track song? Does anyone archive using the Fostex CD burner? [/B]
Click to expand...

The D5 can record 120 stereo minutes from my fostex VF-16 hard disk recorder. using a 120 minute DAT tape. A total of 240 minutes of single track songs. If I back up 24 tracks I can store a 10 minute song. If I back up 8 tracks I can save a 30 minute song.


Problem is one song per tape which can waste tape but keeps things organized.

Regards
Phil Abbate
 
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