Adventures with the Roland VS880 – CF Card and CF to IDE Reader

Working solution are the components above. Transcend 4gb card doesn’t work for but the Clouddisk Compact Flash card seems to work fine I think this maybe a speed issue. The VS880 would find the card but not initialize it – the red led indicating hard drive use would flash but the screen would stay stationary – on the other hand the clouddisk CF card was found straight away – I had to press shift and stop on the VS880 to start the process but once done I was able to partition and format the disk.

The VS880 is now much quieter.

I tried to IDE to CF card adapters the Syba Best Connectivity 2.5″ IDE 44-pin to Dual Compact Flash Adapter is more expensive but is easier to mount in place of the IDE drive.

If you are looking at a cheaper option the ASHATA CF to 2.5-inch 44Pin IDE HDD,Compact Flash CF Memory Card works too.

Using the Syba card you can do this upgrade without taking the VS880 apart – just gain access to the ide drive at the front of the machine – undo 4 screws and pull the old IDE drive out and then push the replacement syba and cf card in – this is fiddly though and maybe be easier if you mount the Syba properly which involves making knew holes on the VS880’s IDE drive caddy and lining it up with the Syba card.

This has worked for me but I take no responsibility for anyone else’s experience. Take note this is potentially dangerous and could break your machine.

4 Comments

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  1. thanks man,, you helped me out getting this thing back and running

    1. Excellent, glad it helped

  2. Thank you for the working component list. I woke my 880 up from a 23 year sleep and the drive is working but for how long? So I purchased your recommended parts to upgrade. I gotta admit that over the years I acquired “better” gear but this thing has a lot of unique features I forgot about. I paid a lot for it at the time as I recall. I dunno – it’s got its own kinda crunch. Cheers!

    1. Excellent, glad it worked.

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