Specifications

Getting Started with MIX84
Partitioning Drives
Partitioning divides a physical drive into multi-
ple, unique volumes, almost as if you were cre-
ating virtual hard drives. Partitioning is usually
performed when the drive is high-level format-
ted (Macintosh) or initialized (Windows).
Seek Times on Partitioned Drives
Seek times are actually faster on partitioned
drives (assuming that reads and writes are per-
formed on a single partition), since the heads
only have to seek within the partition bound-
aries, rather than the whole capacity of the
drive.
In addition, smaller partitions perform faster
than larger partitions. However, this comes at
the expense of contiguous storage space. When
you partition a drive, you will need to find the
compromise that best suits your performance
and storage requirements.
Avoiding File Fragmentation
For maximum recording and playback effi-
ciency, data should be written to your hard
drive in a contiguous fashion—minimizing the
seek requirements to play back the data. Unfor-
tunately, your computer can’t always store the
sound files in this way and must write to disk
wherever it can find space.
In multitrack recording, audio tracks are written
in discrete files, spaced evenly across the disk.
While fragmentation of individual files may be
zero, the tracks may be far enough apart that
playback will still be very seek-intensive. Also,
the remaining free space on the disk will be dis-
contiguous, increasing the likelihood of file
fragmentation on subsequent record passes.
Increased fragmentation increases the chance of
disk errors, which can interfere with playback of
audio, and result in performance errors.
Mac OS allows drives larger than 4096 MB
to be seen as whole volumes. Drives must be
initialized with a disk utility that recog-
nizes the 2 terabyte limit. Single Pro Tools
audio files cannot exceed 2048 MB in size.
Windows XP allows drives formatted with
the NTFS or FAT32 file systems to be seen
as whole volumes. Single Pro Tools audio
files cannot exceed 2048 MB in size.
Avoid distributing audio files within a ses-
sion over different partitions on the same
drive since this will adversely affect drive
performance.
On Windows, to avoid fragmentation, for-
mat drives with higher cluster sizes (such as
32K).
On Macintosh, if Norton Utilities is used, it
must be Norton Utilities v4.0 or later to en-
sure compatibility with HFS+ drives.