Specifications

Appendix C: Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance 65
Formatting Mac Audio Drives
(Mac Only)
For optimum performance, audio drives should
be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
To format an audio drive:
1 Launch the Disk Utility application, located in
Applications/Utilities.
2 Click the Erase tab.
3 Select the drive you want to initialize in the
column on the left side of the window.
4 Choose the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for-
mat.
5 Type a name for the new volume.
6 If you plan to connect the drive to a Mac OS 9
computer, select Install Mac OS 9 Drivers.
7 Click Erase.
The drive appears on the Desktop with the new
volume name.
Partitioning Drives
Partitioning creates a logical volume or volumes
on a physical drive, almost as if you were creat-
ing virtual hard drives. Partitions can then be
formatted with the appropriate file system
(NTFS for Windows, HFS+ for Mac).
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.
Smaller partitions perform faster than larger par-
titions, but this comes at the expense of contig-
uous storage space. When you partition a drive,
you will need to find the compromise that best
suits your performance and storage require-
ments.
Disk Utility (Mac OS X)
Do not choose the “Case-Sensitive” format
option. Pro Tools will not operate properly
with case-sensitive formatted drives.
Windows XP allows drives formatted with
the NTFS file system to be seen as whole
volumes. Single Pro Tools audio files can-
not exceed 2048 MB in size.
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.
Avoid distributing audio files within a ses-
sion over different partitions on the same
drive since this will adversely affect drive
performance.