Project Drive formatting: 64k sectors on a Mac?

WaveLab
1

I’m running OS 10.68 with Cubase 6.51 and read in this forum about formatting with 64k sectors (project and samples drive) to get added throughput but the post was for Solid State Drives. Does anyone know if this is also recommended for standard 7200 rpm Sata 2 drives?

Thanks

2

Bump

3

Hello,

In theory will improve performance. In days past of slow drives and slow computers made an observable difference. In today’s world of fast drives and fast computers along with better firmware, the difference is negligible.
My opinions only of course.
Hugh

4

I tend to agree with you but I read a post on this forum somewhere that there was a significant improvement when formatting this way with Solid State Drives. I was hopping to see some improvement with a regular 7200 rpm drive.
Thanks

5

A SATA 3 drive is good for around 120 tracks (44.1/24 bit) possibly more - do you actually need more disk speed than that? If so maybe a RAID should be considered?

6

I started formatting with 64kB sectors with HDDs when I had some a few years back, and it was then that I noticed that I had 30 to 50% transfer speed improvements when copying 1 GB of mixed size files between two HDDs on the same computer using 64kB sectors as opposed to the default 4kB.

HDDs have lousy 4kB IO ops compared to SSDs. However, even the SSD manufacturers have been spending lots on R&D to get IO ops improved. 64kB sectors bypasses a lot of the issue and allows using less-premium models to still get excellent throughput.

7

Well the only problem is that Snow Leopard doesn’t directly allow you to increase the block size on a single drive only in a raid setup. It seems like there might be a work around by maybe creating a Raid 1 and then deleting the raid. The other thing is that Snow Leopard also makes you use Journaling when you create a raid which on a single audio drive is not recommended because of the extra overhead.

WHat I did was create a single drive raid 1 with 64 k blocks (with journalling) and then deleted the raid and reformatted the single drive with journalling off. The only thing I can’t tell for sure is weather the 64k block size stayed.

What say you folks?? Any suggestions??

8

Ok. Simple answer - it can’t be done on a single drive in OSX.