Direct VS-2480 Recording to External Hard Drive - Roland VS-2480 Tech Support Help Site

Direct VS-2480 Recording to External SCSI Hard Drive

With the new Song-Vault Pro External SATA HD unit, you can actually record directly to an external HD.

To verify this, I conducted a simple experiment.

With the Song-Vault Pro connected, I pressed the "project" button and switched to one of the partitions on the Song-Vault drive.

I then armed 16 tracks and proceeded to record music (on all 16 tracks simultaneously) for about 9 minutes.

Once that was complete, I set all 16 tracks to playback, and armed an additional 8 tracks for recording and recorded again for 9 minutes.

During this time, the 2480 recorded without problems and without any "drive busy" message popping up.

I will be the first to say that I did not test this under the most demanding of recording situations. I did not have any auto mix data, there were not multiple retakes, overdubs, v-tracks, etc...

Anyone who decides to try this on a "mission critical" project should first experiment on less important recordings, just to test the limits of this setup.

Also, it is possible to turn off the internal IDE HD (Go to Utility then System then Param2 to turn off) and boot up directly to the Song-Vault. Since IDE drives are becoming more scarce everyday... and considering that not all IDE drives work inside of the 2480... this might just be a way to get many more years of use out of the 2480.

If you do not have a sound booth set-up and are recording via microphones in a small area, you may need to make a small sound-isolation box to place the Song-Vault in. The unit has a fan to keep it cool and it is slightly louder than the 2480's internal fan.