Hi folks,
I’ve been digging around the forum for info on this and it seems the Ndac is very fussy about which USB stick to use for firmware updates.
The general advice is get a cheap one. However most cheap ones are sold in 3’s or 5’s so they become less cheap… Can anyone point me at a specific USB stick make/model that worked for them.
Many thanks!
PS my Ndac is on 4.10.6 at the moment.
PPS I’ve tried a Sandisk purchased a couple of years back and no joy.
Where did you hear this and what issues did you have with the SanDisk? I can’t see why this would be an issue other than possibly a formatting issue with large drives(?)
The nDAC is fussy. Never had a SanDisk stick that worked with it. Cheap ones of eBay are usually the best bet.
There are several threads on the forum that support this… My own experience (today) is that a SanDisk doesn’t work (FAT32 32GB)…
My current thoughts are to try and find a USB2 stick and maybe the older/slower transfer rates might help, I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I’m grasping a the moment…
The Ndac just doesn’t recognise the drive… I put a WAV file on there which should just play (as suggested by Naim : https://www.naimaudio.com/news/21751/dsd-playback-now-available-naim-audio-dacs) … and no joy. No Sync light, nada…
I always used an old 8gb Corsair voyager with my ndac. Updating bios’s and firmware is just about the only thing it is big enough for these days
From memory I think ndac only supports fat32, I might be wrong though…
Don’t forget that in the days the NDAC was sold, a top flight USB stick was probably 1 GB or less.
are you suggesting it might have difficulties addressing large USB sticks?
I was pondering this…
Large USB sticks can be problematic for the DAC even if you’re able to format them to FAT32.
FAT32 is a must snd you should also be sure that you add files to the root directory of the stick.
That is what I am suggesting! I don’t know how large the firmware update is but probably only a couple of hundred MB or so. I would aim for a USB stick twice the size of the update and yes it has to be FAT 32 formatted.
So I’ve ordered one of these :
Integral 8GB USB Stick
I’ll update later on whether it works or not - might be useful for people finding this post in the future.
Will be interesting to see whether that works as it’s still absolutely enormous compared with those available contemporaneously.
yep agreed… I did however see that others have had success with an 8GB drive, so fingers crossed.
Seems I must have contravened some forum rules by posting a link to the USB stick.
But GOOD news it worked!!
@Richard.Dane I hope a picture of the USB used is ok?
Yup, it’s fine. I just removed the commercial sales link.
sorry for that!! I’ll know better next time 
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