The following are guidelines for what drive formats to use and avoid with Spectrasonics Instruments:
* Drives on Windows must be formatted with NTFS or exFAT. MacOS formatting is not acceptable.
* Drives on OSX must be formatted with MacOS Extended (also called HFS+). exFAT or NTFS is not acceptable. (With one exception: read-only flash drives for installation purposes can use NTFS).
* There is no drive format that can be used for a STEAM external drive that lets users move the STEAM drive back-and-forth between Mac and Windows platforms. The exFAT format is advertised as a portable format, but it cannot be used on Mac platforms for STEAM purposes because exFAT runs too slow on Mac platforms.
* FAT32 formatting is never acceptable on any platform.
* Connection to external drives should be fast: Firewire 800, Thunderbolt, or USB3 is recommended. USB2 is not adequate.
* SSD or disk drives are fine: both will generally perform adequately, although there may be some slow models or configurations that should be avoided. For Keyscape, a SSD is recommended.
* Most of the guidance above is aimed at STEAM data for Keyscape, Omnisphere, and Trilian. Users that only have RMX may be able to get by with lesser configurations.
