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UI24R Recording Drive

bassman59bassman59 Posts: 8
edited July 2022 in Soundcraft Mixing Consoles

Hi all,
Hope this helps if anyone is having problems with recording to an external drive directly from the REC USB port on the Ui24R.
I bought the following items (~£60 total) after a bit of investigating.
1. U Green USB to SATA converter (Connects to any SATA drive but needs an external PSU to power 3.5" HDDs)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07S8MQVRZ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
2. SATA SSD Drive 480G
https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07G3KGYZQ/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o00_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Plugged them into the USB port but they didn't work.!!
Why? because the SSD needs to be FAT32 formatted and you can only format once the SSD is 'Initialised' for use with a PC.
AOMEI Partition Assistant (free edition) will do the formatting and the 'Disk Management' utility in Windows will initialise the SSD. The Ui24R won't recognise NTFS formatted drives so won't record. The format must be FAT32. You can check this in the 'Properties' of the drive. Also you might have bother with exFAT format. AOMEI will convert the drive from NTFS to FAT32 for you.

I had loads of different thumb drives I tried but the buffer in the Multitrack always went to overload because these flash drives cannot be written to fast enough and your recording drive must be ~25-30Mb/s write speed or the Ui buffer will overflow which will mess up the recording of the music file.
So SATA drives are a good option. Even 10year old HDD ones.
At the moment I have a 10 year old HDD (Write speed ~50Mb/s) connected to the Ui and is happily recording for the last hour without a hint of buffer issues. Basically any SATA HDD and definitely ALL SATA SSDs attached to the U Green adapter will work. NVME type SSDs will too but the adapter is different. Remember if you are using a 3.5" HDD as opposed to a SSD then you need a PSU (plugged into the UGreen unit) to power the HDD drive.
2.5" HDDs don't need the PSU.
Happy to help if anyone needs.
Ed

Comments

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    bassman59bassman59 Posts: 8

    Hi again,

    ALWAYS USE A PSU ON AN EXTERNAL DRIVE CONNECTED TO THE USB PORTS.

    Just to update here. It seems that the USB port on the Ui24R is NOT capable of driving an external drive. Even an SSD. So if using the advice given above you MUST use a PSU to power the drive. The USB Port on the Ui is only capable of delivering 40mA. SSDs take more than that to operate and HDDs take even more. You could damage the USB port if you try to run the drive directly. In other words:

    ALWAYS USE A PSU ON AN EXTERNAL DRIVE CONNECTED TO THE USB PORTS.

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    DannyMcODannyMcO Posts: 1

    Is the external HDD also limited 32gb, like a FAT32 USB stick? Or does the SATA interface somehow bypass that?

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    TAICHEETAICHEE Posts: 158

    Danny,
    FAT32 stick limit is 2TB instead of 32GB. All kind of HDD, SSD, SD, and flash drive (USB stick) are same.
    Windows default formatter doesn't format 32GB over, though.

    MacOS can format large FAT32 up to 2TB by their default formatter.
    Even if you only have Windows, you can do it on Windows as well by using command prompt, or something other formatting softwares. Rufus is easy and free.

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    davidlricedavidlrice Posts: 2

    UI24r will accept large drives, however, you MUST reformat the drive to FAT32 with an app, RUFUS is free and works great! Format a large drive as non bootable, Partition = MBR, File system = Large FAT32, Cluster 32kb

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