As most people have discovered, ME1s are very picky over which USB drives they are willing to recognise.
These are two that I know work:
- 8Gb Silicon Motion Inc (Vendor Id 0x090C, Product Id 0x1000)
- 512Mb USBest Technology (Vendor Id 0x0163, Product Id 0x1307)
I’ve just bought a box of 10 generic 2Gb drives from Amazon which come formatted out of the box as MS-DOS FAT16.
I reformatted one as MS-DOS FAT32 first on a Mac, then a Windows machine and then an A&H SQ6. None of this made any difference - the ME1 refused to recognise the drive. However, with the USB drives that an ME1 does recognise, it makes no difference which machine it is formatted on, the ME1 will always recognise it…
So it seems that something is going on at the hardware level of the USB drive.
I’ve also discovered two other things:
- If the ME1 is happy to read the USB drive, then it will read FAT16 just as well as FAT32
- If you format a USB drive on an A&H SQ6 then use the System Information program on a Mac to look at the technical USB information, you can see a contradiction between the file system type (listed as MS-DOS FAT16) and the file system content (listed as Windows_FAT_32). When formatted this way, a Windows machine can read the USB drive OK, but a Mac cannot mount it - even though the data is perfectly OK
Thanks
Chris W
UPDATE
It turns out that the first USB drive I picked up worked fine in a Mac, a Windows machine and an SQ6, but didn’t work in an ME1. I then assumed that since the first one didn’t work, then none of the others would work.
Silly me… after reformatting, all the other USB drives worked fine in the ME1s.
But the general problem remains that just because a correctly formatted USB drive works in a computer or a mixer, does not mean that it will work in an ME1.
ME1s are still really picky…