Fostex d-108 / my computer

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Fostex812

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Hi, I'm using a Fostex D-108 harddisk recorder. It has a scsi connection on it. I also have a pentium2 computer. Is it possible to just connect these two? The main objective is to write my own cd's by using my computer that has a cd-writer on it?
 
In short- no.

The technique you have to use is best referred to as "sneakernet": you need an external drive, and it can only hook up to either the D108 *or* your PC, one at a time. Both the D108 and the PC are SCSI bus masters, and the SCSI drives can only talk to a single master at a time. The SCSI protocol requires one single master and one or more slaves, period. So there is no way to plug a drive into both the D108 and the PC at once, nor is there any way to just hook them together with no drive between them. Both of them will be expecting the other one to listen, and it ain't gonna happen. This is true of the SCSI implementation of all the Fostex product line, as near as I can tell.

However, once you do get that set up, you can format your external drive on your PC using DOS format commands with the old DOS FAT16 filesystem. This is all the D108 understands for .WAV export: the old filesystem with a max of 2 Gb.

When you're done with that, you can power everything down (SCSI is _not_ a hot-swap technology!), unplug the drive from the PC, carry it over to your D108, plug it in, power everything back up, and use the utility menu to write .WAV files to the DOS-formatted drive. The D108 "format" command *cannot* do DOS formatting. It can only do Fostex FDMS formatting, which is completely proprietary and useless to anyone but a Fostex box (but semi-convenient for backups). For .WAV export, all formatting must be done on the PC...

When you're done with writing the .WAV files on the DOS-formatted disk, you can power everything down, unplug the drive from the D108, carry it over to your PC, plug it in, power everything back up, and access the .WAV files.

Sneakernet. This basically rots. My take on this is that it is vastly preferable to have a pair of Jaz drives that remain permanently connected, and just carry the media (which *is* hotswappable!), rather than drag an actual hard drive back and forth. In my experience, SCSI cables do not like continual plugging and unplugging, so hard-drive sneakernet is a failure waiting to happen.

Dumps to SCSI on my D1624 actually do not appear to be significantly faster than real time. Which is why the DAW I've been trying not to build will have ADAT in/out, so that I can just ship the data over optically (at real-time speeds) to the DAW, and vice-versa, and avoid the whole sneakernet hassle altogether...

I'm not a big fan of Fostex's SCSI implementation: it is clearly an afterthought, and a kluge at that. IMNSHO, using the ADAT optical interface is vastly preferable for shipping data to another system. There are a lot of audio cards with 8-channel ADAT I/O capability, so I'd suggest looking into that. I personally chose the Hammerfall, since I needed 16, but there are lots of choices.

Hope that helps.
 
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