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Forums - Music techology
Subject: Hard Drive Format
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Original Message 1/5 13-Nov-06 @ 03:59 PM - Hard Drive Format
so, i have a new drive to format, so what cluster size should i use?
I'm running vst/32.
thanks
Message 2/5 13-Nov-06 @ 04:37 PM - RE: Hard Drive Format
The prime feature behind NTFS is security: to prevent unauthorised users seeing sensitive data, and to provide additional protection against corruption and data loss. It allows access rights to be assigned to files and folders, permitting each user full, partial, or no access at all to specific data. It also features integral file encryption facilities, and keeps multiple copies of its Master File Table. There's also a disk quota system that allows space to be allocated to different users in a transparent way, and it supports transparent compression of individual files, folders, and volumes.
NTFS does have the distinct advantage over FAT32 that its performance doesn't slow down once partitions or folders contain thousands of files, and if you do have such large numbers of files, its indexing feature greatly speeds up searches by maintaining an overall index. This certainly means that for most purposes, NTFS is the better file system.
However, the whole point of an audio partition is that it holds large files, often many megabytes in size, and normally fewer than you'd find on any drive containing Windows or text-based data, such as those found on most Internet servers or company databases. In addition, most musicians are primarily interested in squeezing the last drop of performance from their PCs, so the added overhead of the NTFS protection features won't meet with much enthusiasm either.
However, reports of noticeable differences in performance between the two tend to be greatly exaggerated, especially if you format them both using one of the larger cluster sizes like 32K that are routinely recommended for audio purposes, which means there are fewer overall clusters to manage.
All hard disk read and write operations are handled by the operating system, and not the file system, so your format choice for an audio partition or drive is also dictated by which version of Windows you are running. FAT32 partitions can be read by Windows 95B and C, 98, 98SE, ME, 2000, and XP, which makes it an almost universal format. However, choosing to format your audio drive with NTFS will mean that it's invisible to any Windows 95, 98, or ME partition. So unless you're leaving these behind and moving totally to XP, it's not a wise choice.
Overall, I can't see that choosing NTFS format for your audio drives makes any sense unless you get a performance advantage when running audio applications, and judging by all the information I have, the differences between FAT32 and NTFS with modern PCs are minimal. I've also come across people whose NTFS partitions won't convert back to FAT32 using PowerQuest's Partition Magic, which is another consideration if you later change your mind.
found this on the SOS site
Message 3/5 13-Nov-06 @ 06:34 PM - RE: Hard Drive Format
samples stay in the usual place so the sample s/w or s/w drumbox etc can find them at song loading time
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Message 4/5 13-Nov-06 @ 09:13 PM - RE: Hard Drive Format
Message 5/5 13-Nov-06 @ 09:24 PM - RE: Hard Drive Format
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