Partitioning Drives; Defragmenting An Audio Drive - DigiDesign Mbox 2 Mini Setup Manual

Partitioning Drives

Partitioning creates a logical volume or volumes on a physical drive, almost as if you were cre-
ating virtual hard drives. Partitions can then be formatted with the appropriate file system
(HFS+ for Mac or NTFS for Windows).
Mac OS allows drives larger than 4096 MB to be seen as whole volumes. Drives must be ini-
tialized with a disk utility that recognizes the 2 terabyte limit. Single Pro Tools audio files can-
not exceed 3.4 GB in size.
Windows XP allows drives formatted with the NTFS file system to be seen as whole volumes.
Single Pro Tools audio files cannot exceed 3.4 GB 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 partitions, but this comes at the expense of con-
tiguous storage space. When you partition a drive, you will need to find the compromise that
best suits your performance and storage requirements.
Avoid distributing audio files within a session over different partitions on the same drive since
this will adversely affect drive performance.

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 defragmenting the drive.
80
Mbox 2 Mini Setup Guide