M-Audio Pro Tools SE [31/36] Seek times on partitioned drives

Hard Drive Configuration and Maintenance 27

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 boundar-

ies, 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.

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 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 can-

not exceed 3.4 GB in size.

Avoid distributing audio files within a ses-

sion over different partitions on the same

drive since this will adversely affect drive

performance.