When To Use External Firewire Drives; Formatting; Firewire Bus Powering; Qualifi Ed Drives - Sound Devices 788T-SSD User Manual And Technical Information

788T/788T-SSD User Guide and Technical Information

When to Use External FireWire Drives

The key benefi ts of recording external drives include:
• the choice of drive types include DVD-RAM optical drives or hard drives
• near limitless storage capacity when a large volume external hard drive is attached (up to 2 TB)
• fast, no-waiting simultaneous record option
• post-record copying to quickly back up the internal drive or CF medium

Formatting

Identical to both the internal drive and CompactFlash, attached FireWire drives are formatted as
FAT32 volumes. Upon connection to an unformatted (or non-FAT32 formatted) external drive, the
788T will prompt the user to format the drive. If the drive is already formatted as a FAT32 volume
the drive can be selected as a recording destination. The front panel drive LED will illuminate to
show which drives are available for recording.
ting) in the Drive Directory Options Menu.
After recording to an external drive has stopped, it may take several seconds for the 788T to fi nish
"housekeeping" on drive. This is especially true when recording to DVD-RAM disks, which generally
have slower throughput than hard drives.
When preparing to disconnect a FireWire drive, always observe the activity LED labeled EX. If it is yel-
low, wait until it turns green before disconnecting the drive. If the drive is disconnected while the LED is
yellow, there is a possibility of fi le or FAT corruption.

FireWire Bus Powering

The FireWire 400 and 800 ports on the 788T provides power for bus-powered FireWire drives. The
following conditions should be observed when connecting to bus-powered drives.
• Bus powering a drive requires external DC powering of the 788T, however, the 788T can bus-
power select lower power devices such as a CF card reader from Li-ion power. Sound Devices
recommends using the supplied XL-WPH3 in-line power supply when bus-powering external
storage media such as hard drives and DVD-RAM burners.
• While hot-swapping FireWire cables is possible, Sound Devices recommends making connec-
tions to bus-powered drives with the recorder turned Off.
The 788T does not support the XL-1394 FireWire Power Conditioning Cable accessory for the 702, 702T,
722, and 744T recorders. The power conditioning circuitry is integrated into the 788T's design, negating
the reason for the XL-1394 accessory.
Qualifi ed Drives
External FireWire storage volumes that can be formatted and addressed as FAT32 can be used with
the 788T. These include:
• external hard drives, bus-powered or mains powered. Drives as large as 2 TB can be addressed,
• FireWire CompactFlash card readers,
• DVD-RAM drives.
FireWire drives use a variety of chipsets to perform conversion from the drive's native format (i.e.
IDE) to FireWire. To check for compatibility with the 788T attach a FireWire drive and run the media
speed test selected from the Setup Menu. This will write, then read a fi le to the drive. If the drive can
perform this test then it can be used to record audio.
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v. 1.71 Features and specifications are subject to change. Visit www.sounddevices.com for the latest documentation.
To reformat the external media see Erase (Media Format-