ERASING a 120GB FW drive

[logancircle]

Can anyone tell me the best way to erase a LaCie 120 gig FW drive so that I can begin anew with no frag problems? I just used OSX disk utility cuz that's all I have. Thx mucho!

[sonikbliss]

use OS X disk utility > Erase > Mac OS Extended (if you are using it for audio recording DO NOT USE JOURNALED) Install OS 9 drivers (if you want OS 9 compatibility, recommended)

Open OPTIONS and select Zero All Data

It could take a little while but will do the trick.

[kcrusher]

No need to 'zero all data' unless you need to 'cover your tracks' and completely erase any data on the drive.

[etl423]

Out of curiousity, why don't you want to use Journaling for audio recording?

[logancircle]

I don't know much about optimizing FW HD performance--would this journaling thing help my audio work better (that's why I'm doing it). My Protools LE is often telling me can't get audio fast enough from the drive when I'm tracking or bouncing and I print the plugin effects and still same thing. I zeroed all data, partitioned it into a 60 gig section, brought some sessions back onto the drive and the same problems came up. I've bounced more tracks than this in the past with no problems. Anyone know what's up?

[sonikbliss]

Basically journaling divides your hard drive into many smaller sections so it can keep better track of where on the drive a specific piece of data is written (it keeps a journal of all these small sections if you will).

This is great if you are working with documents or something similar. It is bad if you are working with audio or anything that has to continously stream from disk because now your computer has to look through a million different sections on your hard drive continously and that will make your hard drive's performance suffer and possibly cause other problems. Hope this helps.



Also after you have your drive formatted once there is no need to ZERO ALL DATA again. I you should need to reformat again just use OS X disk utility>partition.

I'm not sure about this but one of our techs told me everytime you use Erase you lose a small piece of the hard drive's storage capacity, but this does not occur when you use Partition.

[sonikbliss]

I don't know much about optimizing FW HD performance--would this journaling thing help my audio work better (that's why I'm doing it). My Protools LE is often telling me can't get audio fast enough from the drive when I'm tracking or bouncing and I print the plugin effects and still same thing. I zeroed all data, partitioned it into a 60 gig section, brought some sessions back onto the drive and the same problems came up. I've bounced more tracks than this in the past with no problems. Anyone know what's up?

After you have a fresh drive, try doing a Save Session Copy In and save all the files on your clean drive instead of just dragging and copying them over. This way all the data for each session will be written together in one section on your hard drive.

http://www.digidesign.com/compato/osx/hd/drives.cfm

[kcrusher]

Here's specific info on what journalling is:

http://www.backupbook.com/03Freezes_and ... aling.html

The problem with journalled drives is that the jounal need to continuously be updated when you're writing (recording) to the drive, which can slow down performance considerably.

So, no, journalling will not help performance in audio or video playback or recording. Only a faster drive or a more optimised system will.

[etl423]

Cool, thanks for the information. I'll reformat my audio partition soon.

[logancircle]

So is it true that a drive like this LaCie 120g won't benefit from partitioning it? Anyone know if 7200+rpm external drives are going to be coming out anytime soon?

[sonikbliss]

So is it true that a drive like this LaCie 120g won't benefit from partitioning it? Anyone know if 7200+rpm external drives are going to be coming out anytime soon?

1.Yes, partitioning won't increase your drives performance

2. 7200 rpm external drives have been out for awhile. Most firewire are 7200. external SCSI goes up to 15,000 rpm.

http://www.fantomdrives.com/products/ha ... index.php4