Pro Tools TDM Mac Requirements For IDE/ATA Hard Drives

Pro Tools TDM Mac Requirements For IDE/ATA Hard Drives

Up to 32 track, 24 bit, 48 KHz performance from one dedicated internal IDE/ATA audio drive is supported on qualified G3 and G4 Pro Tools systems*

Drives must meet the following requirements:

Minimum Drive Requirements

  • Disk drive rotational speed: 7200 RPM or faster.

  • Average seek time of less than 10.0 ms

  • Support of the UDMA66 controller

  • Drive must be dedicated for audio. Note: Boot drives may be used for audio tracks, however performance and track count may vary.

  • Drives should be initialized with Apple Drive Setup as HFS or HFS+ file systems.

Drive Space Required

  • Mono, 16-bit, 44.1 kHz audio requires approximately 5 MB/minute disk space.

  • Mono, 24-bit, 44.1 kHz audio requires approximately 7.5 MB/minute disk space.

Note: Pro Tools has a single audio file size limit of 2048MB, even when used with Mac OS 9.x and the HFS+ file system. This equates to about 4.5 hours at 24-bit, 44.1 kHz.

*IDE/ATA support is limited to Powermac G3 or later models, which include a built-in ATA bus. Pre-G3 models that only shipped with SCSI have not been tested with add-on ATA/IDE controller cards.