User`s guide

DigiDrive Guide32
Keeping Your Hard Drive
Tuned Up
Because Pro Tools is a disk-based system, keep-
ing your hard drives in good operating condi-
tion is essential.
Avoiding File Fragmentation
What is fragmentation? In multitrack recording,
audio tracks are written in discrete files, spaced
evenly across the disk. If the space required to
write a discrete file is not available in a single
contiguous block, the file is broken up into sev-
eral file fragments. This distribution of files and
file fragments in blocks spread out over the sur-
face of hard drive disks causes playback to be-
come increasingly seek-intensive. The decrease
in performance due to this process is continuous
and progressive. As you add new sound files and
edit existing files, the hard drive becomes in-
creasingly fragmented.
Defragment your drives To correct fragmentation
and to prevent this gradual decrease in hard
drive performance, use one of the hard disk
maintenance utilities (for example Symantec’s
Norton Speed Disk and Executive Software’s Dis-
keeper). These utilities will allow you to reas-
semble file fragments and reorganize discrete
files into continuous so they are contiguous.
How often? If you use your system for intensive
editing, or if you frequently delete audio or fade
files from your hard drive, you may need to op-
timize your drives on a weekly basis, or even ev-
ery few days, since it doesn’t take long for even
a large hard disk to become fragmented.
Correcting Disk-related Errors
With continued use, a hard drive’s file system
can become corrupted. The best defense against
this corruption is regular use of a disk repair util-
ity, such as NT’s ‘chkdsk’ or Norton Utilities.
However, the most decisive way to resolve file
system corruption is to backup your data and re-
format the drive. Therefore, if you are getting
disk errors that cannot be resolved through the
use of the disk repair utilities, it may be neces-
sary to backup your data (to tape or another
hard drive), reformat the drive, and restore the
data.
While Symantec and Executive Software
both claim that the use of their products
does not endanger the integrity of hard drive
data, it is always a good idea to backup your
data before defragmenting or reorganizing
files and directories on your hard drive. It is
also a good idea use a use a disk repair util-
ity (such as NT’s ‘chkdsk’ or Norton Utili-
ties) to find and correct file system errors
prior to defragmentation.
The term ‘re-format’ refers to a high-level
format, as performed by Windows NT's
Disk Administrator or Windows 2000's
Disk Management utility. This process
erases all data and recreates the file system,
but does not affect low-level sector and track
information.