Specifications

Mbox 2 Getting Started Guide66
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.
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 effi-
ciency, data should be written to your hard
drive in a contiguous fashion—minimizing the
seek requirements to play back the data. Unfor-
tunately, 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.
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.
On Windows, to avoid fragmentation, for-
mat drives with higher cluster sizes (such as
32K).