Electribe SX: file limit on Smartmedia cards

Antimon

Hello!

I recently bought myself a Korg Electribe SX. It uses large Smartmedia cards to store stuff like samples and patterns. I figured it would be nice to fill up a 128 Mb card with lots of drum samples and other weird sounds that I've generated - but I ran into problems.

I have a little multicard reader from Sandisk that I plug my card into, and use with Windows 2000. When I drag a bunch of samples to the disk icon, it fills up with perhaps 20 Mb of data (this varies from time to time) and then says "Disk full". When I check the disk it says "100 Mb free space", so I should be able to fit in more files...

I'm thinking it might have something to do with the FAT filesystem, because if I reformat the card with FAT32 or NTFS, I can store more on it. Sadly the Electribe won't recognize the card if it is formatted to anything else than FAT.

Does anyone have any insights? Could there be something wrong with my reader, or is this the way it works with FAT? Anything I can do? I've seen Smartmedia being used in other music gear, so if that's the issue other people should have run into this, but I couldn't find anything useful on the web.

Cheers,

Stefan

Blue Hell · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 9:08 am Post subject:

Maybe http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table helps ?

Some of my own thoughs about it are :

The 20 MB max you have suggests FAT12, which is really odd and old, and I don't believe that to be the case. The windows format FAT option should be FAT16.

Maybe you could experiment with explicitely seting the record (allocation unit) size. When in a DOS box/Console window you could type "format /?" to see the options for that.

Maybe only sectors are supported that are equal in size to the flash pages of the actual memory chips. This could be as low 128 bytes, but it varies with the memory device(s) used. Can't quickly find any refs for that though.

deknow · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 10:52 am Post subject:

perhaps try to format the card in the electribe (in case you haven't done this).

deknow

Antimon · Posted: Sun Feb 05, 2006 3:16 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the tips - I had looked at the wikipedia entry already, but didn't notice the FAT12 bit (it's a big page, didn't know what I was looking for).

Format /? gives me the choice between FAT, FAT32 and NTFS. I've tried using FAT with a cluster size of 2048, which I think should be OK, but with the same result. If I use few large files instead of many small, I can fill the card.

Formatting with the Electribe gives the same result as formatting to FAT in Windows. Sad

/Stefan