Drive formatting question:Extended or not?

[l anthony johnson]

In days of old, there were reasons to format audio drives as standard. Today it's seems to be fine to use extended HFS+. In fact, there are some things that demand it. I believe, Stylus, Trilogy and Atmosphere from Spectrasonics will not install onto a drive formatted as standard. Also, when you're dealing with the large capacity drives available now, if formatted as standard, they probably don't show the correct size of files.

anthony

[JKD99]

definitely extended, especially for Firewire

[poppy]

What's the difference?

Excuse my ignorance!

[citysoundman]

What's best for formatting SCSI audio drives (I guess this applies to Firewire also?). Should I choose Mac OS Extended, or just regular Mac OS? I know internal system drives benefit from Extended, but I think audio drives might be better in standard?? And does anyone know how Avid Drive Setup does it - Extended or standard?

Thanx in advance,
Bob

[mrmxed]

Extended for Firewire!

But...
I have always used Mac OS standard for SCSI. If OS extended is now okay for formatting SCSI drives, are there any issues copying sessions from a standard drive over to one formatted as extended?

[Philthy]

my sketchy understanding is that standard formatting maps the drive into larger "blocks" than extended. The upside of larger blocks is that it's less to manage, the downside is that each block can only be used towards one file, so you end up with many partially used blocks and less overall space due to wasted space.

You can verify this on a standard formatted drive- if you copy a directory with many small files (for example, a sample library) from an extended formatting drive to a standard one, it will take up a great deal more space on the standard drive.

[jimlongo]

are there any issues copying sessions from a standard drive over to one formatted as extended?

<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">None other than the files will probably take up less space on the extended drive.

in terms of disk space - you are going to save the difference in size between where the last few bytes of each file reside - i.e. a maximum of 28k saved for each file.

<blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">(HFSblocksize)-(HFS+blocksize)=(32-4)</pre><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">This can be significant with lots of small files.

There used to be an issue with an added amount of delay before PTs would go into record on multiple tracks with HFS+ being slower than HFS - dunno about that now.

I would recommend HFS+ using Apple Disk Utility now for recording because
A) Digi does
B) the format is more modern (and I'm a modern kind of guy)

Apple Drive setup also offers Unix and MS-DOS format but i wouldn't use those unless there was a specific reason for doing so, and in any case not with PTs.

[Lee Blaske]

I haven't tested this extensively, but my empirical observation is that extended file format doesn't work as well with crusty old drives that have crusty old firmware - it seems to slow them down.

If you're using relatively recently designed and manufactured drives though, extended is the way to go.

Lee Blaske