Thanks for your replys... We had earlier minor problems with recognition of USB drives earlier this past spring. Our product support specialist at Sony attended our facility and updated a small utility. Everything was fine... It was related to recognition of Primary USB devices. Speed was never an issue. I understand and get that it takes a bit longer to load to/from thumbdrives and memory cards than it would using the Remote Manger software... I'm not disputing this. I'm still using the same USB drive that I was using when we went online with the switcher, a Kingston 8GB... no problems with this drive before, so why now? I only use it on the switcher and one ADMIN PC. What I still found strange, was after removing the thumbdrive, the speed or response of the GUI side panel was extremely slow when navigating menus and sub-menus. Honestly, last night glaciers were melting faster than I was able to change between menus and sub-menus. I'll check the LINUX version later this afternoon, but I'm pretty sure it is up to date. There were 23 other .tga files on the same thumbdrive. I'll delete those and try again. The new .tga files had a unique naming sequence from the original .tga files on the drive. When it did appear on FRAME MEMORY import, I was able to scroll through RIGHT LIST and select (highlight) the specific files that I wanted... Thanks to AJR and Matt for your help and input. b.

I'm running the same config as Allan (8000G with 7.22), and have observed the same issues. Allan's thought about how many other files exist on your USB drive is a good one, too. We've had speed issues, and have also had a number of failures when trying to save to USB drives (mainly, just backing-up switcher files). The system seemed to intermittently return the same 3 errors on USB drives that I'd successfully used hundreds of times before (a 512MB and a 4GB). I've brought this to our SSE's attention, and have been able to get some valuable input from the guys at Sony. Here's a few things that I learned through our dialogue with Sony: 1. The Linux OS is FAT16, meaning that there is a 2GB file limit on the size of the USB device used. USB drives larger than 4GB may work, but may not be reliable. 2. There is a utility that can be run from page 9994 to do a test on your USB drive to let you know if the Sony switcher is OK with using that drive. It is a non-destructive read/write test, takes a little while to execute, but may help diagnose the issues you are having. 3. Check the version of Linux that your system is running (page 9999). The current build should be from 2005. Older versions of Linux may limit USB performance. The Linux kernel that we were running was from July 2002, so I was able to do an upgrade, and many of the issues we were having disappeared. Hope that helps, Matt

I'm on an 8000G running 7.22 software as well. I've had lots of problems trying to do anything thumb drive related on the 8k. Even something as simple as saving or loading individual snapshots from/to the memory card. I've tried different memory cards (all formatted from the switcher itself) and I've had problems here or there. We've talked to Sony about it. It's a known issue and has been for a long time. Out of curiosity, was that one sequence the only stills on the thumb drive or were there others? I've found if you have a thumb drive full of .tga's or .bmp's, it really slows things down... especially in the FM import menu. Unlike saving a FM still to a show file on a memory stick, when you go to ingest a .tga, the switcher scans everything on the memory stick. The more data you have, I find the longer it takes and slower it is. - Allan