Today I succeeded in adding an external harddrive to my PSR-3000. I had a 2 1/2 inch harddrive still laying around from my 9000 Pro. For 23 Euro's (~ 28 Dollars) I bought a USB housing for it and tried it on the 3000. It worked! No powersupply is needed and the PSR-3000 loads the styles and midi's at lightning fast speeds compared to the 9000 series. It also understands Fat32, so I have now one partition for Styles (4 Gig) one for Midi's (12 Gig) and one for backups and other stuf (2 Gig). The device is small, almost completely silent, talks USB2 if I connnect it to my PC and I only had to spend 23 Euro's on it.

The PSR-3000 is one flexible machine!

[This message has been edited by lacobo (edited 02-12-2005).]

Good report. There were earlier reports that the HDs could not read FAT32--only FAT.

thanks,

Gary

Wow that's awsome you were able to hook up a hard drive to your PSR-3000. I doubt Yamaha anticipated anyone doing that. I don't have a 3000 (will have a 2000 next week), but I'm sure many here will be interested in how you accomplished this.

Squeak

Squeak,

We always knew that you could hook up a HD to via the 3000's USB, however, the part many of us were unclear about was the format. According to the manual, it can only read the FAT format, but apparently that's not the case with the HD. It appears as if it can read FAT32 as well, which means you can use a partitioned hard drive and power it directly from the keyboard's USB. Pretty exciting stuff.

Now I guess I've have to pick up a HD! The woman's gonna' kill me.

Gary

Thanks for clearing that up for me Gary. Man that 3000 is an amazing board. I totally understand about the "woman". Aside from keyboards I'm big on model railroad. Every time I buy something for one of my train sets I have to buy it first then face the wrath later

Squeak

[This message has been edited by squeak_D (edited 02-12-2005).]

Ok, let me tell you how I did it. I first tried out the harddrive with the old 9000 format (4 x 2 Gig fat), that worked fine.

Then I connected the harddrive to my XP PC and was surprised to find out that the little device tricks XP to think that the harddrive is an internal HDD.

Now in Disk management (rightclick My Computer, Manage, Disk management) I removed all the partitions, Created one Primary partion of 4 Gigabyte, and an Extended partition of the rest of the drive.

In that Extended partition I created 2 Logical drives from 12 and 2 Gig. I placed some files on it and did the test.

The 3000 seemed happy to work with the disk, but it look as if it was a bit slow. So I reformatted the 3 partitions (shown as USB1, USB2 and USB3) with the PSR-3000.

Now I returned to the PC and started filling the disks. I have now 1000s of styles and 100.000s of midifiles on it. The response time is not much slower as the solidstate solutions (thump-drives).

By the way: On page 195 of the manual it states that a harddrive is possible. The big surprise for me was that the 3000 can bring up the power (5V, 1A), shows USB1, USB2 and so on for the partitions and that it accepts FAT32.



[This message has been edited by lacobo (edited 02-13-2005).]

Thanks Lacobo. This can be highly information for those who have lots of style and midi files available. Both can be categorized in folders and instantly accessed direct from the hard drive on the fly.

Good post,

Gary

If you buy a HD, make sure that it has Fluid Bearing , so there is hardly any noise coming from the drive.

Bert.