How about loading individual clips/stills from the external drive like you can on the regular hard drive, that would be nice. Rather then a complete wipe out and restore. Also while we are on the topic. Is there any way to hard edit out parts of a clip on the 2nd FM board (clip only ext clip). You can delete stills to make more room with regular clips but no way it seems to hard edit top and tale of a transition that you record into the 2nd FM board.

[quote="Chris Boden"]Another cool feature will be added in the next (or one of the next) software updates. You will be able to create 15 partitions on the harddisk in order to backup and restore clips from a larger amount of setups.[/quote] That's good news! When I looked at the 5 partitions we have now, it appeared that each was about 4Gb (using most of our FM space, 1080i, with about 190 free spaces). 15 would be much more flexible, and would certainly be a better use of the drive space. Matt

Thanks Curt! We're going to buy a LaCie-Harddisk, as our Head of Engineering told me lately. Another cool feature will be added in the next (or one of the next) software updates. You will be able to create 15 partitions on the harddisk in order to backup and restore clips from a larger amount of setups. Chris

Chris, We run a "G-Tech" 500 gb drive on each of our 2 G Frames. G Technology Inc G Drive Q 500 GB P/N GDQ 35/500 Had no issues, other than every once in awhile having to power cycle the drive to get it to come up on the gui. Work great.I believe we got them from B and H Photo. I will say, I think we tried the internal raid version ( I believe w/ two drives in the case), and that didn't work. If I remember correctly, Sony would't "see" the drives. These drives have ( alteast the ones we have) all sorts of connectivity on the back. (e-sata, FW 400, FW 800 (2 ports) and USB) Other cool thing is they are pretty small and are rectangle in shape..so they don't take much up of a footprint. Curt

Chris: I'm not sure what the specific errors are, but I would think it has to do with the size of your hard drive being 1 GB. The switcher may be trying to partition the drive and is telling you there is not enough space to do this. I know sony recommends a 320 GB drive. Here is a link to a previous post that has info about external HDD. [url]http://editsuite.com/new/viewtopic.php?id=1355[/url] Joe

Hi Matt! Thanks for the quick response! :) I'll try to find another harddisk and ask our Sony rep. In every case, I will keep you updated! (By the way, restarting the system did not help...) Thanks, Chris

Hi Chris! Last I knew, Sony recommended the LaCie d2 Quadra Hard Drive (eSATA, 1.5 Gbits, Firewire 400/800, USB 2.0) at 320Gb. That said, a larger drive won't necessarily give you more storage space, only because of the way the switcher needs to partition the drive for use as a backup. That doesn't mean a larger drive by a different maker won't work for you, though. Very much like the size limitation on USB memory ... I know that Sony recommends a 2Gb limit, but I've successfully used 4Gb and 8Gb cards, too. I have experienced the same errors here, and have been in touch with our service rep at Sony. I successfully used the firewire drive for about a year, then started experiencing random failures that only a reboot of the switcher frame could fix (communication with the drive would halt, sometimes the switcher couldn't find the drive, etc.). After tracking the problems and reporting the details to our service rep, we learned that there is a known issue with the firewire connector on the FM card. The parts were on back-order last I heard, so I haven't had the opportunity to discuss the details of the failure or solution with them yet. You may want to confirm that your firewire drive is working (like connecting it to a computer), and if it is, maybe have your engineers contact your Sony service rep. I'm not sure if there is a service bulletin about this issue, but they seemed to know a lot about the difficulty when we called to report it. Good luck, and keep us posted! Matt