I am going to post here since it seems reasonably simular to the problems stated above. If the question has already been answered and I missed it feel free to kick me. Recently we have had issues with the USB drive on the Sony (8000-G with the 7.2 upgrade). We are using Kingston 2gb sticks and sometimes the Sony just does not like them. Sometimes to get the switcher to recognise my stick I have to do a full reboot just to get my stick to be seen. I recently visited Matt Saplin in Orlando and I do remember him saying something about some sticks the Sony just doesnt like. (Hi Matt, Mike from Baltimore!!) I am just wondering if this is a problem with our switcher, or is this common with all of the Sony's. Thanks!

[quote="AJR"]I've always been told to go no bigger than a 1GB thumb drive. The ones we have living in the control rooms here are 1GB sticks. I have a 2GB stick I use. I rarely have problems with my 2GB stick but we have problems all the time with the 1GB sticks. Go figure.[/quote] I have been using the new 32GB Corsair drives for a few months with no problems. I've used everything from the 32GB's down to 1 GB's with no noticible difference in performance. I know that after a save/load/import/export operation, the thumb drive seems to need a minute or two to do some "housekeeping" - it was when I didn't wait for the thumb drive light to finish flashing & I prematurely pulled the drive that I saw lockup problems.

[quote="davetd"]According to our maint. staff, the USB keys need to be formatted using FAT16 and not 32.[/quote] Did they really say FAT16??? FAT32 was introduced in Win95, so why do the engineers think you need an older file system? Did they confuse FAT32 with NTFS? Remember, most removable drive media comes formatted as FAT32 because OS X, all modern Windows versions and Linux can read/write that system. The newer proprietary NTFS can be read by OS X and Linux but generally not written to it without work arounds.

Interesting. We have had an 8000 since 03 and I use my regular thumb drives with no issues. Maybe I have had no problems because the largest is only 1GB in size. I have never reformatted the drives within the Sony, I have used my XP machine to reformat one drive and it works on our Sony as well as NMT's HD6.

According to our maint. staff, the USB keys need to be formatted using FAT16 and not 32. It seems to me that not all USB flash drives work anyway. Regardless of how you format them. I decided to go a different route and not use USB keys altogether. I purchased a 2 gig Sony memory stick and have not had a problem since. - Dave

From the beginning we were told nothing larger than 2gb, format it in the switcher and only use it in the switcher. The interface is usb 1.1 so its slow anyway. Some new usb flash drives do not support usb 1.1 so make sure the drive you select says its backwards compatible. We go one step further and never plug it into a windows machine. I use a separate usb flash drive for software upgrades. In version 7.11 and below it is normal procedure to refresh and mount the drive. In version 7.20 they added an auto-mount feature.

We've had probs with the desk (ver 7.11) freezing up and had to reboot several times, what's this advice on 1GB memory cards as we've been using 2GB since the desk was installed? Also everytime we use the memory card we have to set it as a primary in the engineering setup, any fix on this?

We had an issue in our 24hr news control room where at the end of a bulletin someone decided to put a memory stick in to transfer some material. Anyway it locked up the entire switcher and a full reboot was in order. Not really a massive problem except no one noticed that during the reboot the audio embedders lost power and when they went live at the top of the clock there was no audio and no one could work out why. They use a 9000 however it spooked our engineers enough that there is now a ban on using USB thumb drives on any or switchers including the two 8000G's

I use an 8gb, I locked up the GUI once, because I do not think I was patient enough. I have found once I set as a primary, and go to file menu, select memory card and wait a bit for it to read the directories. Before asking it to find the correct folder. Dave what ver are you running?

I've always been told to go no bigger than a 1GB thumb drive. The ones we have living in the control rooms here are 1GB sticks. I have a 2GB stick I use. I rarely have problems with my 2GB stick but we have problems all the time with the 1GB sticks. Go figure.

I will try the smaller drive and see what happens. I'm still having similar issues with the new auto refresh deal as well. - Dave

We're still on 7.11 here, and I haven't had this tie-up happen. What I have noticed is that some USB operations are a bit slow, but it seems to be directly related to the size of the USB drive ... so if I use a 512 MB drive, things move pretty quickly, but if I use my 4 GB drive I see a dramatic increase in the time it takes to perform an operation (load, save, or delete). I do know that the Sony programmers addressed some USB issues in 7.2 ... basically so you no longer have to go into Engineering Set-up, refresh, and make your drive 'primary'. Make sure your SSE knows that you're having this trouble ... at least if the folks at Sony know, they can try to duplicate it and come up with an improvement for next time. Matt

This problem seems to be cropping up more and more. Thanks! - Dave

It happens to us once in a while. What we usually have to do is power cycle the SCU. Since the USB drives and the menu are attached to the panel, that usually seems to fix it. If it keeps happening, you may have to reboot the panel and switcher.