USB Flash Drives

USB Flash Drive Usage Tips

• Choose a USB drive that is mechanically compatible with IMS-5 and is narrow enough to be fully inserted into the USB port through the opening in the system enclosure.

• For best reliability, use well-known brands and models, such as a Sandisk Ultra Flair.

• Do not let the USB drive fill up more than 75-80%, because write speed will decrease 50% or more for nearly full drives.

• Use USB 3.0 drives for faster read/write speeds. USB 3.0 drives usually have faster internal read/write speeds than USB 2.0 drives, even when used in a USB 2.0 port.

• Higher-capacity drives of the same brand and model (32GB and larger), may have slightly faster speeds than lower-capacity ones.

• Do not load house data into Stitch directly from the USB drive - copy it to the computer hard drive first.

• Do not pull out the USB drive from the camera while it is running without using the Eject USB Drive function first from the Manage tab.

• The drives must be formatted with FAT (MSDOS) filesystem and have only one partition. USB flash drives are usually configured like that by default. Note- FAT16/FAT32 are a part of the same file system and are also compatible.

• Carry a spare USB drive with you just in case your main drive dies!

  Most issues that disrupt your work on-site involve the USB drive.

USB Flash Drive Issues

Keep getting “NO DISK” in the Project tab when trying to create a new project.

Ensure the USB drive is narrow enough and can be fully inserted into the USB port through the opening in the system enclosure. If the drive is too wide and its body does not fit through the opening, it will not make a reliable electrical contact and will either be not detected at all or will disconnect intermittently leading to loss of data.

Fisheye images (h.jpg files) are found to be corrupted when importing into Stitch.

Sometimes a drive may start failing and will not record images properly already in Survey, however, the issue is inside the drive, so Survey may not always detect such problems. Also, Survey uses downsampled s.jpg fisheye images for showing on a mobile device when shooting, whereas full-sized h.jpg images are used in Stitch. To take better care of the drive, never unplug it from the computer without prior ejecting it by using the appropriate menus in your computer operating system.

Exported images are found to be corrupted when uploading iGUIDE.

This may happen when house data is processed by Stitch directly off a USB drive. It is recommended to copy data to the hard drive and process is there. To recreate corrupted files, right-click on a pano in Stitch and choose to reload it.

I can't find the project folder on the USB drive.

This may happen if the project folder was accidentally moved to or created inside another project folder. Try searching inside other project folders.

I can't copy my project from the USB drive to my hard drive on a Mac (Error -36).

Find the USB drive in Finder and use the Eject button (little triangle to the right of the drive). Then, remove the USB drive from the computer and re-insert it.

A note about Mac formatting.

Apple will automatically add an extra 200MB EFI partition if you use the GUID Partition Map in Disk Utility. This will result in 196MB of free space reported by Survey (see below). If you re-formatted a USB drive on a Mac and have more than one partition created, you will need to erase the disk again.

In newer versions of macOS, the formatting Scheme selector is hidden by default. You need to go to menu View and select the Show All Devices option, then select the whole USB disk and choose Erase. At that point, you will see an option to select the partition Scheme and file system Format as shown below. You must choose the Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme and MS-DOS (FAT) filesystem.

Filesystem Note:

A USB drive formatted with an NTFS filesystem (one of several supported by Windows) will be seen by the camera, but not seen on a Mac.