The only serious flaw of the EX5 is that the optional SCSI is extremely slow.
It is so slow that it is virtually useless in a performance.
Loading 10MB of samples from a ZIP drive takes as long as 6:45 minutes!

Benchmarks for the EX5 SCSI were made with a stock EX5 outfitted with the optional ASIB1 SCSI (200 USD). SCSI transfers were made from:

1) An internal ZIP drive installed in the EX5.
2) An external ZIP drive.
3) An external JAZ drive (1 GB)
4) Yamaha's TWE (Tiny Wave Editor) on a P300 PC with 128MB RAM*.
*The PC transfers should represent the maximum achievable speed because the samples were transferred directly from PC RAM.

• 1 MB samples were used for all transfers. Larger sample sizes resulted in identical performance per MB.
• Both the internal and external ZIP SCSI connections yielded the same transfer rates.

Results were as follows: Transfers to the EX5 ZIP JAZ TWE 43 sec. 34 sec. 22 sec.   Transfers from the EX5 ZIP JAZ TWE 23 sec. 23 sec. 15 sec.

The results are conclusive: The EX5 is only capable of receiving at 47KB/sec. and transmitting at 68KB/sec. At its best, it will take 22 seconds to load each megabyte. That equals a whopping 23.5 minutes to load the full 64MB RAM.

To put this in perspective, the standard lowest common denominator SCSI speed is 5MB per second, making the EX5 SCSI approximately 100x slower than standard SCSI.

The results also show that the faster the hard drive used, the better the results. Unfortunately, a hard drive cannot be mounted inside the EX5 (no power is available), so if you need the fastest speed possible, go external or get the internal JAZ. Internal ZIP and JAZ may be installed by using the floppy power cable. It is unfortunate that Yamaha insists on using proprietary power cable formats because there is enough room to mount an internal hard drive.