Interesting product. But don't get too excited, the marketing speak (BS) is getting pretty deep.
You can only get 60 channels by using some fuzzy math, and I'm not sure what you can do in standalone mode. It's primarily a computer interface box.
-It has 8 line level analog in on the back great for patching those individual direct outs from a SBD.
-Plus 4 XLR on the front can use onboard preamps for room mics or whatever you want.
-Then you can feed it 2 channels of AES from a V3 or equivalent.
-Then 16 channels can come in from 2 sets of 8 ADAT light pipes. ADAT is like an 8 channel TOSLINK.
-That adds up to 30, and the other 30 are playback over those same channels I guess.
-All those channels at 44 or 48khz sample rate, with less I/O available at higher bitrates, which is pretty standard.
I don't think you can expect to plug a hard drive into the USB port and record to it. USB is a master/slave system. Generally speaking a computer is the master, and a hard drive or audio interface is a slave. You can't connect 2 slaves together and expect them to talk. It's not just software, it's a hardware restriction (I spent some time researching this a while ago trying to invent an embedded device for my company, so trust me on this). Firewire is peer to peer, and could possibly do this, but I doubt it does. A SD744 can write to a firewire drive, and the JoeCo boxes can write to a USB hard drive, but those are the only devices I can think of that use the recorder as a master and an external drive as a slave.
I think what you can probably do in standalone mode is bring in a bunch of analog ins and pipe it to an ADAT recorder, or vice versa. This might be useful in front of my HD24 in the sense I gain some preamps and superior A/D's, which is basically the old UA5 and JB3 paradigm, except more channels. But for $2100 there are lots of nice preamps to go in front of my HD24.