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After recording to an external drive has stopped, it may take several seconds for the 744T to fi nish
“housekeeping” on drive. This is especially true when recording to DVD-RAM disks, which generally
have slower throughput than hard drives. When preparing to disconnect a FireWire drive, always observe
the amber activity LED labeled EXT. If it is lit, wait until it is off before disconnecting the drive. If the
drive is disconnected while the LED is on, there is a high likelihood that the fi le being written will be
unusable and there is a possibility of FAT corruption on the drive.
FireWire Bus Powering
The six-pin FireWire port on the 744T provides power for bus-powered FireWire drives. The follow-
ing conditions should be observed when connecting to bus-powered drives.
• Bus powering a drive requires external DC powering of the 744T. The 744T cannot operate bus-
powered drives from an attached Li-ion battery.
• When recording in realtime to bus-powered FireWire drives the XL-1394 FireWire Power Filter
is recommended. This fi lter network isolates the electrical noise in bus-powered drives from
the 744T.
• While hot-swapping FireWire cables is possible it is recommended to attach bus-powered
drives with the recorder turned off.
Qualifi ed Drives
External FireWire storage volumes that can be formatted and addressed as FAT32 can be used with
the 744T. These include:
• external hard drives, bus-powered or mains powered. Drives as large as 2 TB can be addressed,
• FireWire Compact Flash card readers,
• DVD-RAM drives.
FireWire drives use a variety of chipsets to perform conversion from the drive’s native format (i.e.
IDE) to FireWire. Sound Devices has tested and qualifi ed enclosures and card readers which use
the Oxford 911 and 922 chipsets. Other chipsets may operate, but Sound Devices does not offi cially
support them. To check for compatibility with the 744T attach a FireWire drive and run the media
speed test selected from the User Menu. This will write, then read a fi le to the drive. If the drive can
perform this test then it can be used to record audio.
DVD-RAM Drives
DVD-RAM drives are essentially optical hard drives. Revision 2.00 fi rmware supports recording to
and playing back from DVD-RAM drives when formatted as FAT32 volumes.
When recording to DVD-RAM drives in realtime it is important to note the following:
1. Keep sampling rates at or below 48048.
2. Record to polyphonic fi le formats.
3. Use DVD-RAM drive mechanisms and media that support 3X recording speeds.
Post-record copying from internal hard drive (or CF) to external drives is recommended with material
recorded at high sampling rates.
Summary of Contents for 774T
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