Is it possible to replace your internal VP-9000 Zip drive with a Compact Flash drive?
Definitely, YES. It HAS been done. Is it easy or guaranteed? NO. Many who have tried have failed.
So why would you want to replace your drive? Perhaps your drive has broken, with the infamous zip 'click of death'. Or you consider the blank media is expensive/difficult to find and your zip library is getting too bulky. But before you take the plunge, just consider that a replacement zip can be found on eBay (search for Internal zip 250m ATAPI IDE or Z250ATAPI) for £25 upwards, and keeps your unit standard spec.
To swap your drive, your will need a compatible Compact Flash drive, a special CF card (read on) and extended IDE cable. The VP-9000 should work with any internal compact flash unit connected to the ATAPI/IDE port. However at the present time the two compact flash reader/writers found to work internally in the VP-9000 are:
- Startech StarTech.com 3.5in Drive Bay IDE to Single CF SSD Adapter Card Reader: Amazon.co.uk: Computers & Accessories
- Addonics/Aimtec ADIDECFB | IDE CF Drive with black color bay bracket | Addonics Internal Flash Card Reader - Aimtec
Actually they're both exactly the same hardware, so buy which ever is currently cheapest.
| TIP: Latest firmware is key |
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Results from many early adopters have had very mixed results. Amongst the results there are 2 known cases where the CF card failed on the older OS, and after updating worked perfectly so there are definitely some relevant bug fixes in the latest version. There are also several known cases where the right CF cards should have worked, but didn't know at the time could have been due to old OS. In conclusion it is essential that you run the latest VP9000 firmware, v1.12. Therefore if necessary Update you OS version first. |
Steps to replace your drive:
Unplug the power! To mount the CF adapter into the front, you must remove the 6 large rack ear screws and 2 large side screws, then the 5 small rear screws and slide the top casing off. The existing Zip drive is held in by two top facing small screws at the left, then a stubborn nut at the lower right on a sliding hole, which you might need a small socket set to detach. I recommend detaching the entire support frame, unscrew the Zip drive entirely, then temporarily screw the frame back into the VP-9000 on it’s own.- Hold your CF adapter in the front slot so that it lines up exactly with the plane of the sampler’s front, and mark/etch on the support plate where your CF adapter's black plate reaches. Put superglue/epoxy on the black base of the adapter and fit it to the VP-9000 support frame (I took mine back out to do this carefully). Then when dry refit the 2 screws and the bottom nut.
- The IDE cable that comes inside the VP-9000 is not long enough to connect to the rear of the adapter. You can either use a generic 40 pin longer IDE cable with the 4 pin power to floppy power cable that comes with the adapter, or use an IDE to smaller laptop IDE cable that feeds power directly to the smaller laptop connector on top of the adapter. If you use the latter you do not need the floppy power connector, just the 4 pin power connected to the laptop cable.
- Screw back together and have fun.
| TIP: Choosing the right CF card |
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When these adapters are used in other devices such as MPC4000 and Yamaha A5000, most CF cards are accepted in those. The adapters in the VP-9000 can be problematic, although this can be down to incorrect firmware versions. The cards that have been found to work are the Transcend INDUSTRIAL compact flash cards. These commonly come in 1gb (blue) size, but are also available in blue and red larger sizes of 8GB, 16GB and 32GB, and are printed with the speed codes CF150 or CF170. You can pick these up second hand from eBay and can be quite a lot cheaper than new from Amazon. Sometimes these cards are described as 80x or 100x, and are printed with the speed codes CF80, CF100, CF150 or CF170. Known functioning cards are: Transcend Industrial 256MB CF80 (80x) The VP-9000 will *NOT* work with a compact flash card formatted from a Mac/OSX. It has to format a card itself or use Windows XP/7/8/10 or Linux to do so. The manual states that the maximum disk size is 2GB, but I suspect this was because during development of the sampler they were using FAT16 format (there are filename restrictions in the VP-9000 that would agree with this). However it can use FAT32 and larger partitions. It will not recognise multiple partitions on the same compact flash though. If you format a compact flash on the VP-9000 it will format a maximum size of 8GB even if the card is larger. If you have a 16GB you can format it on Windows and it will be read and usable on the VP-9000 at that size. |
