Specifications

Appendix B: Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance 69
appendix b
Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance
It is recommended that you start with a newly
formatted external or secondary internal audio
drive. You should also periodically defragment
your audio drive to ensure continued system
performance.
Avoid Recording to the
System Drive
Recording to your system drive is not recom-
mended. Recording and playback on a system
drive may result in lower track counts or fewer
plug-ins.
Supported Drive Formats and
Drive Types
Drive Formats
Windows Windows XP systems should use drives
formatted as NTFS only.
Mac Mac systems should use drives formatted
with HFS or HFS+ file system only.
Hard drive performance depends on factors in-
cluding system configuration, number of tracks,
session sample rate, density of edits, and the use
of crossfades and other processes such as Beat
Detective in a session.
For complete hard drive requirements, see the
Digidesign website (www.digidesign.com).
SCSI Hard Drives
Digidesign recommends qualified SCSI hard
drives and a qualified SCSI host bus adapter
(HBA) card or (on Windows systems) a qualified
built-in SCSI HBA connector on the mother-
board.
For complete information on track count and
the supported number and configuration of
SCSI drives, visit the Digidesign website
(www.digidesign.com).
Always back up any important data on your
drive before formatting it, as it will erase all
data on the drive.
Windows systems can also support Mac
drives formatted using the HFS+ system
(also commonly referred to as Mac OS Ex-
tended). Refer to the Pro Tools Reference
Guide for more information.
HFS drives are supported as Transfer drives
only.
For more information, see Appendix A,
“Connecting SCSI Drives.”