Akai S1000 / S1100 samplers

The Teac CD-532S wasn't one of the drives I recently got, but the one I normally use with my E-mu or Roland samplers.

I just decided to have a go at getting it work with the S1100 even though it's listed as not being compatible on the web somewhere (can't remember where I saw that).

All I had to do was change the block size jumper setting to force the drive into 512k bytes/sector mode and it worked fine loading samples from Akai disks. It is a bit glitchy in that the S1100 doesn't really know about the volume structure on the disks when you change them so it does still give HDD errors but you just have to start selecting volumes and it's back in business. No problems waking the drive back up after it sleeps either.

A theory: Most SCSI hosts will communicate what logical block size they want to receive (usually 2048 bytes/sector with CDROMs) and the drive should switch to the correct block size when receiving this message. Either the Akai SCSI card doesn't even send a message or possibly it only deals in 512 or 1k bytes/sector (as these two options appeared on the screen when I was setting the SCSI ID). Probably all down to the thing about the Akai not being interested in which type of device is connected to it?

So, if you have CD drives that haven't worked then try setting the block size to 512.
On to the Panasonic drives next.