NTFS

[Nick Syrett]

the protools installation manual does not mention ntfs - what is the current support for ntfs?

we have a large amount of disk space (150gb). Being forced to use fat 16 will lose us a great deal of disk space.

[DigiTechSupt]

Hi Nick. At the present time we don't support
NTFS on audio partitions. You can use it but you'll take a performance hit (less simultainiously playing tracks; densly edited sessions may choke). There is code in our low level driver that the system uses in order to maximize and optimize disk access and playback from the buffer called "disk scheduler". It will only work on FAT16 disk volumes. That's how a single card like a Mix core card can process and playback up to 64 tracks of audio, edits, automation, etc. etc.
So, you might gain more usable disk space with NTFS but it won't be as useful. I don't have any word yet as to when there might be disk scheduler code for NTFS or FAT32.

Tom S.

[Nick Syrett]

Tom

Thanks for your reply re NTFS. The reason we purchased ProTools was to record live events - about 6 hours of live music 24 track - therefore we checked your compatibility list and bought 8 18gig drives that match your specs.

Nowhere in any pre-sales documentation does it mention that you cannot use the full size of the drives - or that ProTools will not work on NT's native file system. This is wrong.

Now we are stuck with very large drives with a max partition size of 4 gig - this is problematic - now we will have about 24 drive letters - and there are not 24 letters in the alphabet that are free! - this is disappointing and we would like an eta on when you will support the hard drive size that you say you support in your compatibility list (why do you list a 23 gig drive when you can only use 16gig of it with 4 partitions??) Why do you support Apple’s HFS file system on NT when you do not even support NT’s own file system, this is ridiculous!

Any further help you can provide on this major problem would be appreciated ASAP.
Nick

[Digi Engineering]

You should be able to use NTFS to do your 24-track records. The place that NTFS has a performance compromise is when playing back lots of finely spaced edits. I would try formatting your drives NTFS and doing a test run with the typical kind of session you plan on using. I would bet that it will work just fine.

Getting 64-tracks with finely spaced edits requires some technical wizardary that requires us to know the actual physical location of the files on the disk. This information is not readily available with NTFS and that's why it doesn't perform as well as FAT.
-Mike Rockwell