The following are guidelines for what drive formats to use and avoid with Spectrasonics Instruments:
* Drives on Windows must be formatted with NTFS. MacOS formatting is not acceptable.
* Drives on OSX must be formatted as MacOS Extended (Journaled) (also called HFS+). exFAT or NTFS is not acceptable. (With one exception: read-only flash drives for installation purposes can use NTFS). If you are are using Mac OS High Sierra or later, APFS will also work.
* There is no single drive format that can be used for a STEAM external drive that works on both platforms.
*NTFS format is recommended for transferring STEAM folders between platforms, however, it is not suitable to be used as the permanent format for the location of the STEAM library on a Mac
* FAT32 and ExFAT 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.
