Specifications

Appendix C: Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance
63
Smaller partitions perform faster than larger partitions,
but 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.
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 de-
fragmentation.
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. Unfortunately, your computer can’t al-
ways 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 dis-
crete files, spaced evenly across the disk. While frag-
mentation 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 discontiguous, increasing the likelihood of
file fragmentation on subsequent record passes.
Increased fragmentation increases the chance of disk er-
rors, which can interfere with playback of audio, and re-
sult in performance errors.
Optimizing (Defragmenting) Drives
To prevent fragmentation, you can optimize your drive,
which rearranges your files into a contiguous format.
Most optimizing software lets you run a check on a
drive to find out the percentage of fragmentation. If
your drive shows moderate to heavy fragmentation,
you should consider optimizing it.
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 optimize your drives on a
weekly basis, or even every few days, since it doesn’t
take long for even a large hard drive to become frag-
mented.
Avoid distributing audio files within a session
over different partitions on the same drive since
this will adversely affect drive performance.
On Windows, to avoid fragmentation, format
drives with higher cluster sizes (such as 32K).