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BLACK
BOX
PLAYER
- User Manual v 3.1
Deciding on a disk drive
The BlackBox Player is not particularly fussy about its Disk Drive. We cannot
guarantee that every drive in the world will work, but the ones we’ve tried
and approved so far have done. The core criteria that you need to follow are:
Up to 2TB with USB2 or USB3 interface
Formatted with FAT32 Filing System
Not “bus” powered (some bus powered drives may work but we cannot
guarantee it)
Does not perform off-line calibrations such as thermal recalibration
Uses standard 512byte sectors (a few large drives use larger non-
standard sector sizes to squeeze more space onto a drive)
This means that most drives that are both Mac and PC compatible will work
ok. USB2 can carry up to 480Mbits/s of data and for recording 24 tracks of
96kHz/24bit the maximum data rate we need is less than 60MBits/s so
there’s normally plenty of headroom. JoeCo has already tested numerous
USB2 drives from Western Digital, Glyph, Verbatim, Samsung, Buffalo,
Hitachi and others and found them to work well.
Some drives have power saving built into them which is particularly difficult
to turn off completely and some of these drives have gone into sleep mode
in the middle of being used. We had added routines to try and keep these
drives operational but as we cannot guarantee that they will work, we advise
users to avoid these drives.
USB or buss-powered drives often draw more current than the USB2
specification allows (limited to 500mA) and can therefore not be used
without providing a separate power supply.
Standard Flash RAM drives (aka thumb Drives) are not fast enough to take
the full USB2 data rates that the BBP requires. However, modern large fast
thumb drives (32GB and larger) are now fast enough to provide the data
rates that the BBP requires. Check with JoeCo or your local distributor for
latest recommended drives or ask your retailer to try before you buy.
