We’re seeing more and more users operating Pro Tools systems on Windows machines. As such we’re seeing more and more Tech Support issues unique to those systems. One common thread pertains to optimization of disk subsystems for Pro Tools work. Much of the success, or lack thereof, you have with Pro Tools depends on how well your hard drives are performing. Here are some good pointers to get you going courtesy of Digidesign and the Sweetwater Technical Support Staff.
1) Enable DMA Mode on your ATA drives – Your disk performance will be AWFUL unless you enable DMA mode for *all* of your ATA drives. Go to the Device Manager Tab of the System Applet (in the Windows Control Panel) and bring up the Properties dialog for each of your ATA/EIDE disk drives. On the Settings tab, you’ll see a check box for DMA mode. Make sure this box is checked.
2) Use FAT32 instead of FAT/FAT16 – FAT/FAT16 partitions are limited to 2 GB. FAT32 partitions can be huge, and are therefore easier to manage.
3) Use large (16K or 32K) clusters on your audio partitions – Most disk formatting utilities (including the built-in “format” from the Windows Explorer) default to a 4K cluster size with big partitions. While smaller clusters may be great for eliminating “cluster waste” when you have many small files, using small clusters will limit disk performance with Pro Tools (since the drive needs to do more work to read the same amount of data). Audio files are typically quite large (tens of KB’s to many MB’s), so make sure you format/resize your partitions with 32K clusters. There are many disk management utilities on the market these days that can resize the clusters. Consult with Sweetwater Technical Support further if you need specifics.
4) If you start seeing -9073 “disk too slow errors”… The easiest thing to try first is to increase the “Setups/DAE Buffer Size” in Pro Tools (note that you’ll need to exit/relaunch Pro Tools before the change will take effect). A setting of 4 will work for most situations, but very dense edits on medium-slow drives may require a DAE buffer setting of 8. Larger buffer settings allow more time for the disk to “look ahead” and read audio in time for use within Pro Tools, but the downside is that stopping/starting the transport takes a little bit longer.
Another option is to periodically defragment your audio partitions (be sure to back up the data first!). It’s sometimes easier to back up the data and then simply reformat the partitions instead of defragmenting.
Finally, you can eliminate “disk too slow” errors by splitting your audio tracks across two or more drives. Instead of putting all 24 tracks on one drive, put 12 on one and 12 on another (or 8 tracks on three drives).
5) Do “bounded” records – If you are working with audio partitions that are very large (greater than 4 GB), you can speed up the time it takes to start/stop the transport in Pro Tools by doing “bounded” records. A bounded record means that Pro Tools knows the maximum amount of time you’re going to record before you hit record/play on the transport. You can bound/limit the length of the record pass by doing one of the following:
a) Use the selection tool and select/highlight a region of time before recording. When you make a time selection and then record, the recording will stop automatically when the time cursor reaches the end of the selection (you can still manually press stop if you need to “punch out” earlier).
b) Go to “Setups/Preferences/Operation” in Pro Tools and at the bottom of the dialog under the “Open Ended Record Allocation” section select “Limit To:” and enter a value like 5 or 10 minutes (or whatever you’d like). This will limit any record pass to the value you specify.