I do not have the schematics in front of me in order to determine if each of Montage's 4 ONFI memory parts can be accessed simultaneously or not. Each of these parts is capable of 40 MBytes/s of data bandwidth. If all 4 can be accessed at once by the memory controller, then this is 160 MBytes/s worth of bandwidth. There does not need to be a FAT filesystem to contend with which is additional overhead for a USB stick. The theoretical max for a USB 2.0 stick is 60 MBytes/s. In practice, I see one test site showing a maximum of 14MB/s for USB 2.0 sticks tested and as low as 9MB/s. I see another user getting 18MB/s from a Sandisk Cruizer (USB 2.0).

I'll round up for USB flash (20MB/s). Compared to internal memory - if all 4 can be accessed at the same time - Montage internal is 8x faster than the best USB stick. Then you have a range of USB stick performance which shows Montage could be 18x faster than a poorly performing USB stick.

Also, I'm not sure if the USB controller in Montage is shared with some other device which would chip away at the maximum bandwidth afforded to the USB stick.

The lack of constraints on USB performance as well as, even if you have the best stick, the degraded performance of a USB stick are two of the major reasons working against your request for using USB as memory expansion. Not to mention the routines are currently optimized for memory connected to a dedicated controller vs. going through a file system.

What I haven't mentioned here is latency - which is another killer. Probably closer to the real reason why USB sticks are not going to work. It's just easier to describe bandwidth than latency - and what impact latency has depends a lot on internally what Montage does with the data flow (if for each performance all waveforms are "cached up" or real-time read from the memory controller - as one for instance).

"Unlimited" resources has a way of influencing unlimited bad habits. If 5GB was offered, content providers may spend less time optimizing the libraries so you'll end up with bigger libraries to install (although still constrained perhaps by how long it takes to load as a metric). And users would be less conservative in selecting what to keep which would generally put you in the same place - running out of 5GB and requesting maybe 100GB. Which if 100GB would land you in the same place requesting 500GB..... 1TB ...

There's never any "perfect" limitation because there's always a class of users operating at the edges wanting to get beyond this but cannot.

Hello Dave - I use a 16Gb USB as a back-up and store-room. You can store as many Libraries/User Banks as the USB will hold, but Montage is limited to 8 Libraries at any one time - no matter how big (max: 640 Pfs) or small they may be. There are also conventions you must observe if you are to avoid mishaps (for example, you can't load a User Bank into Montage without destroying the User Bank already in Montage).

You cannot access the USB directly as you can on a Tyros, say. You have to load what you want to use into the Montage first, which might mean deleting material from Montage in order to do that. It's a bit restrictive, but you soon find your way around it. In practice it works out reasonably well, if rather slowly, except for the rigidity of the Save/Load system (another thread). I agree that 1.75Gb looks a bit niggardly, but how long is a piece of string? As Jason says, you work within the limits imposed and hope Yamaha are listening to your whinges ...