Instruction manual

Using Blackmagic MultiDock
6
Identifying Drives
Blackmagic MultiDock has 4 independent drive bays. We recommend naming or renaming your drives so you
can easily identify them. You can name your drives when formatting using the Disk Utility application on Mac
OS X, or Windows Disk Management on Windows. Renaming your drive is as easy as right clicking on your
drive in Finder or Windows Explorer. It’s also helpful to physically label your drives so you can visually identify
the drive in each drive bay.
Formatting Drives
You can use any 2.5" SSD or HDD with Blackmagic MultiDock. New drives need to be formatted so your
computer can read and write to the them. If you are working with Blackmagic cameras or HyperDeck, your
drives will need to be formatted to either HFS+ or exFAT. These disk formats allow large file sizes and long
video clips captured as single files.
HFS+
This format is also known as Mac OS Extended and is natively supported by Mac OS X. HFS+ supports
“journaling” which means your data is more likely to be recovered in the rare event of corruption, or a
hardware or software malfunction.
ExFAT
This format is supported natively by Mac OS X and Windows. ExFAT does not support journaling which
means data is less likely to be recovered in the event of corruption, or a hardware or software malfunction.
You can format drives at any time, even if you already have data written on them. However, formatting a
drive deletes all its data so be sure to back up anything important on your drive before it is formatted.
A new drive will need to be initialized so your computer can use it
to read and write data.
You can easily rename your drives using Finder in Mac OS X,
or Windows Explorer.
Using Blackmagic MultiDock