Tascam 788 manual Improved Hard Drive Capabilities, RE-FORMAT Partition

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Section II

Improved Hard Drive Capabilities

OVERVIEW RE-FORMAT (PARTITION)

Before v2.0, the 788 could identify and use up to 16GB from a single hard drive. v2.0 increases the usable area to 64GB of space. Be aware that this does not magically increase the size of your hard drive, it merely increases the amount of space that the 788 can recognize. You’ll have to obtain a larger drive (either internal or external) to take advantage of this.

Keep in mind that the maximum capacity of a song is 7GB. This provides almost 1 hour and 45 minutes of all 8 tracks at 24 bit. If you need more time, you may need to break the recording into a few song files.

About Partitions

Whenever a system is writing to a hard drive, the data on the hard drive has to be stored at an “address”. As hard drives get bigger and bigger, more and more addresses are needed. Eventually, you’ll end up in a situation where the system cannot provide any more addresses, and the extra space cannot be used.

The computer industry ran into this problem in the mid- 90’s. To get around it, they allowed the drive to have multiple “partitions”. Essentially, they broke the hard drive capacity into smaller, manageable pieces. To the system, each partition appears to be a different hard drive. In reality, they can all be from the same drive.

Before v2.0, the 788 could use up to 4GB in a partition, and allowed up to 4 partitions per drive. This allowed for a total of 16GB of space on the drive. With v2.0, the partition size is stepped up to 16GB. Since you can still have 4 partitions, that offers a total of 64GB of space.

A Note About Hard Drive Sizes:

If you replace your internal hard drive with a larger drive, or connect an external drive, you may notice that a drive will not yield all of the space that a drive quotes. For instance, a 60GB drive may only give you 56GB of space once mounted on the system.

There are two main reasons for this:

1 - Drive manufacturers will typically advertise “unformatted” capacity. Some space is used just in formatting the disk.

2 – Most drive sizes are quoted with rounded figures. In the chart at right, you can see that each step up in measurement actually occurs in steps of 1024. However, the quoted size will round to even thousands. This minor difference adds up to about a 7% variance between the drive's quoted size and its actual capacity.

Occasional formatting of the hard drive is generally considered to be “good housekeeping” on any system. Since the 788 can now hold such huge amounts of data, our engineers felt it may be cumbersome to back up everything, then format the whole drive, then restore all the data again.

To make this easier, they decided to offer the ability to format just one partition. It's kind of like giving you the ability to clean one room of a house at a time, rather than cleaning the whole house at once.

So, if you want to reformat partition 2, you can just copy the data you want to partition 1, then format only partition 2. Very simple!

Please keep in mind the difference between the FORMAT and RE-FORMAT commands. FORMAT clears out the whole drive. This is still needed if you choose to change the partition size, or if you want to wipe the entire drive clean. RE-FORMAT only formats one partition.

Step By Step Partition Formatting

1)Press MENU.

2)Select , and press ENTER.

3)Select and press ENTER. The 788 will display each of the partitions that are currently available.

4)Highlight the partition you wish to format, and press

ENTER.

5)The 788 will verify that you want to reformat the partition. Press ENTER again to confirm.

Rounded Hard Drive Size				Real Hard Drive Size
(Quoted Drive Sizes)				(Actual Storage Capacity)
1000 bytes = 1			KB (kilobyte)	1024 bytes = 1			KB (kilobyte)
1000	KB	= 1	MB (megabyte)	1024	KB	= 1	MB (megabyte)
1000	MB	= 1	GB (gigabyte)	1024	MB	= 1	GB (gigabyte)
1 GB = 1,000,000,000 Bytes				1 GB = 1,073,741,824 Bytes

≈ 7%

Difference

Improved Hard Drive Capabilities TASCAM 788 v2.0 Addendum • 7/2002 Edition