Setup guide

Appendix C: Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance 73
Defragmenting an Audio Drive
Mac Systems
When working with larger files (such as video), you can limit fragmentation by backing up
your important files to another disk, erasing the files from the original hard disk, then copying
the files back, instead of doing a defragmentation.
Window Systems
Periodically defragment audio drives to maintain system performance.
For maximum recording and playback efficiency, data should be written to your hard drive in
a contiguous fashion—minimizing the seek requirements to play back the data. Unfortu-
nately, 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.
Optimizing (Defragmenting) Drives
To prevent fragmentation, you can optimize your drive, which rearranges your files into a con-
tiguous format. Most optimizing software lets you run a check on a drive to find out the per-
centage of fragmentation. If your drive shows moderate to heavy fragmentation, you should
consider optimizing it.
On Windows, to avoid fragmentation, format drives with higher cluster sizes (such as 32K).