Radio Shack FX2 User Manual download pdf (Page 13)

I s Y o u r H a r d D r i v e O i v i n g Y o u a H a r d T i m e ?

D a v e P. W o r t h

After purchasing my EPS, it took me about 15 minutes to real

ize the need for a memory expansion. The next day I started to

shop around the mail order dealers, soon ﬁnding that if I ever

was to get a SCSI interface, it would have to be compatible

with the memory (the same manufacturer). So by day 3 I was in

the market for both, even though I didn't yet see the need for a

hard drive. Being a computer systems design engineer, I

analyzed the market and picked the cheapest. (They all work

the same don't they?) Well, the ﬁrst one I received didn't, but

the company was very helpful and sent another the next day,

which has been ﬁne ever since.

Not being near an Ensoniq dealer, I ﬁtted the unit myself which

was very quick and easy and didn't even cost me my warranty

— I'd lost that by taking the thing to bits to poke around the

day after I bought it.

The extra memory was a great help, but it does make loading

slow and storing banks tedious when you need 3 disks to dump

it onto, so I took the plunge and started hunting down a hard

drive. Guess what? The same company won again on price.

When the drive arrived, I started on a new adventure resulting

in a few tips which may be of interest to any new hard drive

owner.

1. The SCSI plug usually comes ﬁtted with locking screws to

avoid accidental removal whilst the unit is powered up, which

c o u l d r e s u l t i n a l l s o r t s o f e l e c t r o n i c n a s t i e s . B u t t h e s t u d s t o

receive these screws are not ﬁtted to the EPS, as the rear panel

carrying the SCSI connector is too thick to allow their ﬁtting

and still have the coimector properly seated. Solution: Remove

the connector and panel and ﬁle 1/8 " out of the hole to allow

the connector to be ﬁtted to the outside face. Then ﬁt your

"Radio Shack" retaining studs and reﬁt the panel and connec

tor. The plug can now be ﬁxed in place with no fear of

problems.

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2. The hard drive was working and I could store and retrieve

data, but it refused to boot from the hard drive. I soon found

that the EPS will not recognize drive "zero" as a boot device;

setting it to "one" did the trick.

3. After using the unit for a couple of hours, it started to

produce garbage. This was no reﬂection on my playing skills

but was a fault. I rebooted the unit and it failed to tune the key

board. This repeated several times. After the unit had been left

powered down for a while, it recovered, only to fail again in the

same manner a few hours later. The problem had to be power

supply drift due to the extra loading or overheating.

To cut a long story short, the problem was a ground loop

through the disk drive via the SCSI to the keyboard. Solution:

Remove the ground pin from the disk drive supply plug and let

it ground through the SCSI. I have also seen this same problem

on an ESQ with a ﬂoppy drive on the MIDI port. Even though

the MIDI is optically coupled to avoid ground loops, they still

connect the shield on both ends of the cable.

A common symptom which will let you know if you are suffer

ing a ground loop problem is "noise on the audio outputs"

when loading from and saving to disk. To be sure, try powering

up the EPS with the hard drive connected but not plugged into

the supply. Turn up the volume and listen if there is a sig

niﬁcant increase in noise as you plug in the drive (still with the

drive turned off). If there is, you have probably found the

problem. The best solution is to isolate the drive case from the

drive while leaving the case grounded to the supply and the

drive grounded through the SCSI interface. A simpler solution

is to remove the ground pin from the drive supply plug, which

probably breaks all of the federal regulations but what the heck,

I ' m B r i t i s h .

4. If you constantly write and erase data on your drive, you can

end up with the disk "fragmented"; don't panic. This refers to

the state in which the data is stored and can be rectiﬁed by a

back-up and reload of the drive (a tedious task if you don't

have a tape streamer). The fragmentation causes the disk access

time to be greatly increased. The way to avoid this is not to

keep erasing data, which is no problem on sound samples but is

normal when writing songs. Here is a good way to overcome

this and to make the best use of your sound banks.

When you have put together a group of sounds and put down

your song, the next thing to do is to save it. Before you rush off

and save the song in your "songs directory" on the hard drive,

try changing the storage device back to the good old ﬂoppy and

save the song there. Next go back to the bank directory on the

hard drive and save the sound bank. What's so good about

keeping songs on a ﬂoppy, you may ask. Well, not only does it

get rid of the disk fragmentation problem, but your sound bank

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Radio Shack FX2 User Manual Page 13

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