Hi all.

Just wondered if anyone here had experience with Sony Anycast live production swtcher.
I've been having a hard time trying to record onto an external firewire (Seagate Barracuda 500GB) hard drive. It looks like the HDD is being sucsessfully formatted from the unit showing me various max recording times weather it's a Full Format, 270, 140 or 90gig partition. But all my attempts to start recording always fail giving me an Internal Error message: "Recording failed due to unspecified error". After powering the Anycast Station off and on again the hard drive appears as unformatted.
Are there any specific HDD brands or models recommended for work with the AWS-G500? I tried another 500gig Seagate I had with same result.
Firmware version in my unit is 2.15.
If somebody has any ideas please advise. It would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Stas Bobkov

PS I've tried a different hard drive (Maxtor 200GB) with no luck. Same error message :(

Does the Sony Anycast Switcher support using an external firewire hard disk drive for recording purposes?

Or does it just output firewire, which then must be recorded via a Firewire recording device such as the Focus Enhancements Firestore, which is much more than a Firewire raw hard disk drive?

Yes, it does record onto an external FireWire HDD directly and can play back what's been recorded afterwards. The hard drives though must be formatted from the unit to its native Linux Ext3 file system first.
All recording and playback controls are on the right hand side of the switcher.
Two FireWire hard drives connected to two separate 1394 ports can be operated at the same time as I understand.