How to best format hard drive for recording/producing music?

[Kveldulf]

Hello... I was wondering if anyone could tell me how to format a hard drive in a way that would optimize performance, for recording and producing music. I was told that it would be best to format it a certain way if I'm going to use the computer mainly for a small home recording studio. I'm going to have 1 hard drive for the operating system and what not, and another (nicer, faster) one to record the music to. Does anyone know what I should do?

Cheers!
Kveldulf

[sparqee]

Assuming you're using Windows you will get better performance from a hard drive formatted with NTFS. Once the disk is in use keep it defragmented. If it becomes fragmented or fills up past 80% (or so) you'll start to see performance degradation.

[Kveldulf]

Thanks, though I think NTFS is what people normaly format it with (and yes I'll be using Windows XP) for every day use, isn't it? But, I guess there isn't anything too special I should do to format it for my needs. That would work just fine I suppose... I'm not a computer genius or even very knowledgable about computers, so thanks for the info. Any other suggestions are welcome.

[tacman7]

There are a lot of things to do to optimize your computer.

I don't know if there's a thread here covering that...

But formatting is pretty much formatting.

Unless your talking about setting up a raid configuration. Multiple drives, different ways to set up, for performance of for data integrity.

Or your talking about partitioning the drive. I don't really see an advantage.

But modern drives can keep up with the needs of a DAW without anything special.

[sparqee]

Originally Posted by Kveldulf

Thanks, though I think NTFS is what people normaly format it with (and yes I'll be using Windows XP) for every day use, isn't it?

NTFS is typical unless you want to be able to plug the drive into a Linux or Mac system in which case you'll need to use FAT32.

Hard drive aside turning off unnecessary services will improve your system's performances. Things like anti-virus and indexing can get in the way of fast read/write processes and if you're running your system close to it's upper limits you'll want all the CPU cycles & RAM available for your DAW. Just do a Google search on "optimizing XP DAW"

[gorgash]

Keep in mind though if you format as FAT32, there's a file size limit of 4gb...