Octatrack MKII max CF card size

Hi,

I looked around, but haven’t found any 100% info on that:
what is the max size card Octatrack MKII can handle?

128gb or 256gb SandDisk Extereme or Extreme Pro will work fine or?

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AFAIK 64 gb.

Check this thread.

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nothing wrong with searching the manual - the first hit on ‘flash’ shows the answer … pretty clear


3.4.1 COMPACT FLASH CARD SPECIFICATIONS
Cards supporting UDMA and at least 133x (~20MB/s) for both reads and writes are compatible with the Octatrack MKII. Cards must be FAT16 or FAT32 formatted, preferably FAT32. Up to 64 GB Compact Flash cards are supported.

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Has anyone tested 128GB CF card with both OT mk1 and mk2?

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Yup, the question is not what’s in manual, but if someone tried that…

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Just curious how much more utility 125Gb would provide vs 64Gb? I have a 16Gb card and have filled 2Gb over 2 years, so I figure I am good for more than a decade.

Makes sense if you have large sample library and want to have it available all the time for instant access on OT. My lib at the moment is around 2TB, incl. commercial packs, custom libraries, rare synth and acoustic recordings, fields etc…

I also like to sample long modular pieces directly into sampler and trim later. So on Digitakt I filled 1gb drive in a week or so.

Otherwise, of course 64 or even 16 gb is more than enough for performance or space saving work, like trimming everything, etc…

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Every now and then a thread pops up with someone trying 128GB cards and failing. There is a reason why they mention the restriction explicitly in the manual.

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Ok! Just haven’t seen any of such threads…

Using search terms “128GB CF” reveals a bunch.

For example this one from last October:

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The 16gb 50mb/s card that came with my mk2 is painstakingly slow.

Thinking about sticking in a 120mb/s Sandisk Extreme card.

Will I see a speed boost while loading/saving from and to the card?

I don’t have these laying around for testing

Are you’re projects using a lot of RAM, slots?
How long does it take?

I didn’t noticed significant difference between my older 40MB and my 120MB Extreme, but usually I don’t use much samples, mainly recordings.

My projects are very small in size. Loading especially takes a looong time. I think about 5 seconds for 5mb of samples.
My Octatrack MK1 was quicker. I was a bit shocked speed was only 50mb/s. With the static slots feature I assume it will bottleneck quickly.
Even my old Emu with SCSI is quicker reading/writing from and to SD

Quick test with MKI, 120MB : 10 secs with 20MB in RAM…

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…10 years ago, 64gb was huuuuge…
and hey, end of the day it still is…

i run 32gb cards only…

and with the extreme/pro cards i’m able to stream 8 stereo files of any size flawlessly…
and that’s all the max it needs…

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That’s like an eternity too! ;—)
I guess the marginal difference isn’t worth it then

Not exhaustive test!
A comparison playing several long static files would be interesting.