Careful with what USB Flash Drive you choose

I’ve been having an extremely frustrating time getting SanDisk Cruzer 16GB and 32GB USB Flash Drives to work with the DDS80. The short story is that they do not seem to be compatible with the DDS80 whatsoever.

I have purchased three of the SanDisk Cruzer flash drives. 1-16GB and 2-32GB. Both of these drives are formatted as FAT32 and mount properly on both my Apple iMac Desktop and PC Acer laptop. I am able to copy files to and from the flash drives with no issues on my computers. So I loaded them both with mp3’s and then ran the Numark Librarian software on both of them in order to create the Library that the DDS80 needs to enable you to search for music.

When I plug either of the 3 drives into either of the 3 USB ports on the DDS80, they do not mount and the DDS80 does not recognize them at all. The flash drive LED’s flash a few times then go into their “breathing” state where the LCD gently pulsates. But they do not mount and it is as if they weren’t plugged into the DDS80.

I thought that maybe the DDS80 USB port was underpowered and not able to provide enough current to the flash drive for it to function. To address that potential issue, I then plugged the USB drive into a powered USB Hub. That did not cause the flash drive to be recognized by the DDS80 either.

I called SanDisk and they told me that since the drives function properly in both my computers, that there is nothing wrong with the flash drives. They suggested that I try a powered hub with the DDS80, which I had already tried. They then suggested that the DDS80 firmware may not be able to handle high capacity flash drives. So I called Numark and spoke several times with technical support there. I am still waiting for their response but in my conversations, they claimed that they were not aware of any limitations of size of flash drive usage in the DDS80.

I have successfully been able to use a 2GB Lexar flash drive, a 2GB Sandisk Cruzer flash drive and a 2GB Macally flash drive. Unfortunately I do not have an 8GB flash drive to try.

So right now I’m stuck with 3 flash drives that do not work in the DDS80. Until Numark responds to my issue I would strongly recommend you stay away from SanDisk flash drives larger than 2GB in capacity until I get an authoritative answer from Numark.

If you’ve got any experience with larger capacity flash drives in the DDS80, please comment on this post. And be specific as to the brand and size that you are using. Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.