Emax II Harddisk / Floppy Replacement ?

[Vincent]

Hello Emuthiasts!
Glad to found this useful forum. 
A friend of mine sold his Emax II Turbo with a build in 1GB Harddisk. The HDD works – I can load banks from it but it seems that he always had booted from floppy disk since the Emax is not able to boot from the HDD – the error “Disk not formatted” appears … strange.
Anyway – my idea is to replace the HDD with a much quieter device like a SD or Compact flash card.
The best thing would be to have the HDD and Floppy Disk replaced by one SD/CF unit which can boot directly from the SD/CF and store my sounds on it.  I read some of the posts with this inconvenient IDE to SCSI device. It seem to work but it’s kinda weird ?
Question from my side: Is there a up-to-date solution with less effort to realize? How did you update your E-mu with a CF/SD – does it works smoothly?
Thanks a lot for your advice.
-Vince

[PFM]

Hi Vince,

I replaced both my Emax II Turbo keyboards with the CF card solution: SanDisk UltraII 1GB. Both boot from the internal CF cards.

I used the Acard SCSI-to-IDE adapter, which works well. I tried a number of IDE/CF card adapters, and they all seemed to work OK. The only REAL issue - and it was a BIG headache - was finding the correct CF media. Some media is just too fast, others give error messages like "SCSI offline" or "SCSI error...". I'm having that exact problem at the moment with an ESI4000 machine
There is a list of user-tested IDE/SCSI adapters and CF card media on the Yahoo EMAX group site.

Just to point out that although I used 1GB CF cards, the Emax II only formats a disk up to around 540MB (approximately), but there's no harm using a larger capacity card, as the format process has a better chance of finding the 'good' parts of the card.
(Theoretically, you could use 6 SCSI adapters and have 6 CF cards, giving you over 3GB of sample storage!)

The plus points to using CF cards:
Quiet, cool to run, light, less power consumption, good for reading data from...

The down side to using CF cards:
eventual write failure. You can't write to the card as many times as you can to a traditional hard disk drive, but that shouldn't really be an issue, unless you plan to constantly save samples every day on the card!

Hope this helps.

myk