Partitioning Drives - DigiDesign Mbox 2 Academic Getting Started Manual

Formatting Mac Audio Drives
(Mac Only)
For optimum performance, audio drives should
be formatted as Mac OS Extended (Journaled).
To format an audio drive:
Launch the Disk Utility application, located in
1
Applications/Utilities.
Disk Utility (Mac OS X)
Click the Erase tab.
2
Select the drive you want to initialize in the
3
column on the left side of the window.
Choose the Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for-
4
mat.
Do not choose the "Case-Sensitive" format
option. Pro Tools will not operate properly
with case-sensitive formatted drives.
Type a name for the new volume.
5
If you plan to connect the drive to a Mac OS 9
6
computer, select Install Mac OS 9 Drivers.
Click Erase.
7
The drive appears on the Desktop with the new
volume name.
80 Mbox 2 Academic Getting Started Guide

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 or FAT32 for Windows, HFS+ for Mac).
FAT32 drive partitions have a limit of
2 terabytes (2000 gigabytes), whereas NTFS
drive partition sizes are almost limitless.
Windows XP allows drives formatted with
the NTFS or FAT32 file systems to be seen
as whole volumes. Single Pro Tools audio
files cannot 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.
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.
Avoid distributing audio files within a ses-
sion over different partitions on the same
drive since this will adversely affect drive
performance.