low level format and one drive for audio

[keysmia]

Steve and others . Can I really expect to get 24 tracks from a 001 system and one drive partitioned 3 times? I have a 10,000rpm IBM ultrastar 18.2 gig drive. I also did a low level format. Is that O.k? I have heard conflicting reports on this. Let me know Thanks.

[This message has been edited by keysmia (edited June 03, 2000).]

[Mike Thornton]

I suspect it should be possible as long as you keep all 24 tracks within the same partition. Don't try and spread the tracks across the partitions. Although this works for multiple drives it makes things worse on a partitioned drive.

Hope that helps,

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Mike Thornton
One Stop Digital (OSD) Ltd.
http://www.osd-uk.com

[Steve Rosenthal]

Mike's correct. As long as you stay within one partition at a time, you're effectively reducing the distance the heads have to travel, thus improving seek time.

Re: Low-level formatting...
We generally don't recommend it. It's unnecessary in most cases, and a power loss during a low-level can render your drive "brain-dead." Most drive-related problems that we see are due to high-level format issues: directory corruption, driver corruption, etc. Those are all conditions that are easily remedied with a quick initialization. If you are low-leveling due to bad blocks, then you should actually replace the drive. It's pretty rare for today's drives to develop bad blocks, but sometimes they due -- and not always because of bad blocks per se. Head alignment or servo tracking errors can produce "bad block" errors, due the fact that the heads may no longer be aligned with track center. This kind of failure cannot be fixed with a low-level format. If you are using DigiDrives or Avid storage, and you develop bad blocks, the drives should be returned as-is for failure analysis. Low-levling the drive is akin to wiping finger prints off a piece of evidence.

--Steve Rosenthal, Digidesing ETS