Emax II : Disk Drives

Internal Hard Disk The original hard disks have a rather small capacity at 40 - 127 MB, although they are reasonably quiet. At launch the Emax II TURBO was fitted with a shock mounted Conner CP-340 hard drive, with an unformatted size of 42 MB. E-mu Systems then switched to using Quantum ProDrive LPS drives for the larger capacities (105 MB, 210 MB). These drives were also used extensively in Apple Mac computers too.

Upgrading the Internal Hard Drive It is relatively easy to add or replace the hard disk. A newer drive will be faster, and it will live longer! The Emax II uses narrow SCSI hard disks, and the maximum size the Emax II will format is around 500 MB. Recommended and tested drives are shown in the table below (they can still be located second hand or on eBay). The Conner and Quantum ELS are the quieter models to go for. The disk drive will format and verify in around 30 minutes for 519 MB of formatted space (540 MB unformatted drive).

Installation is easy once you have found a way of mounting the drive. E-mu Systems made a special metal plate for it to sit on. The internal SCSI socket and power cable are already in place.

External Hard Drives  A range of external hard and removable drives can be used with the Emax II. The formatting limit is 540 MB, so chose a small SCSI drive.
The Syquest range of removable drives work well with the Emax II, and they can found second hand or even new.

Recent Iomega ZIP 100/250 drives seem to work well, but users have reported some intermittent problems in the past. This could be due to early ZIP 100 models not being fully compatible. We have found that the Emax II will format a ZIP250 successfully.

Emax II Recommended Hard Drives    All have tested OK The complete Quantum Prodrive LPS SCSI range will also work. Hard Drive Model Disk Space MB RPM   Seek Time (ms) Data Rate (Mb/sec) MTBF (hours) Power (W) Noise (dBA) Conner CP-340 42 3600 29 7.5 20k 4.25 40 Maxtor MXT540S 540 6300 8.5 23 - 40 300k 9 40 at 1 foot Conner CP-30540 546 5400 10 28 - 43 250k 9 40 Quantum ProDrive ELS170S 170 3633 17 16 250k 4 39 Seagate ST3390N 344 4500 12 21 - 36 250k 5.7 38 Conner CFA340S 343 4011 13 23 - 33 300k 5.7 40 Disk Space = Unformatted disk space in MB RPM = Rotataional Speed of the disk in revolsution pre minute Seek Time = Average time to access the disk Data Transfer Rate = Internal transfer rate from the disk media MTBF = Mean Time Before Failure, how long the drive lives! Power Needed = Power required in seek mode Noise = Maximum Noise Level at 1m

Choosing a Legacy SCSI Drive Internal hard disks are very convenient but have to be chosen careful to avoid noise, heat and power problems. Disk drives manufactured in the 1980's and early 1990's were not particularly designed for use in samplers, so it is all too easy to find the drive runs very hot, is noisy and may even pull too much power. E-mu Systems were reasonably careful in using hard drives that were fairly quiet and ran warm , they also used shocked mounted drives initially - before this aspect of design was properly sorted. They frequently used drives that were used in Apple Macs.

Noise Levels
The first criteria to consider is the noise level. The sound level of modern disks is often around 30 - 35dB, this is around 6dB quieter than a legacy drive. Look for a drive that has a small number of platters and rotates slowly - this will generate less noise. Noise specifications are sometimes inaccurate.

Power Consumption
The Emax II can only supply a limited amount of power to the hard drive, so choose a drive with a lower power consumption rating. This will also help keep the sampler cool . The more power consumped the hotter the drive gets. The hotter the sampler the faster its components fail.

Power On Time When a hard drive is powered on it has to achieve the correct rotational speed and then load its microprogram from disk into its memory. This can take up to 20 seconds, which means the Emax II will take a longer time to Boot up the OS from the hard drive. The Emax II continues to search the SCSI chain at boot time, so if the drive is not ready in time for the first pas through the SCSI ID's, it will find it subsequently. You can set the drive to a higher SCSI ID number to give the drive more time to spin up pior to the Emax II looking for that particular ID.