• Apple OS X

  How do I turn off journaling?

  Posted by Chris Gorman on February 15, 2009 at 1:12 am

  I just had to do a clean install of osx.4 on my G5. When I erased the hd using disk utility, it let me choose the option for extended without journaling, which is what i wanted for my fcp boot drive.

  But, the osx.4 install disk would not let me install unless i booted onto the install disk. when it did that, the i did not give me any option to turn off journaling. I thought that once i completed the install, I’d be able to use disk utility prefs. to turn off journaling, but it’s greyed out.

  How do I get this done without journaling? The reason I don’t want journaling, is that I think it will slow things down on this drive which is my boot drive for final cut studio.

  Chris Gorman replied 17 years, 3 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Chuck Reti

  February 15, 2009 at 2:17 am

  The recommendation frequently posted on this forum and elsewhere is that it is best practice to turn journaling off on your media drive(s), which of course should never be the same as your boot and application drive. I don’t believe that you can turn it off on your boot drive, once it is initialized/formatted. From an Apple document on the subject: If journaling is turned on for a disk, Mac OS X maintains a continuous record of changes to files on the disk. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, Mac OS X uses the journal to recover the hard disk to the last acceptable state before it stopped.
  You want maximum throughput from your media drives (journaling can have an effect, though very minor, on performance). You are not accessing data continuously from an application/boot drive so journaling’s effect is essentially nil.
• 

  Chris Gorman

  February 15, 2009 at 3:55 am

  Thank you. That confirms what I was moments ago reading on these forums, that it’s best have journaling on for the boot drive. Good, now I don’t have to sweat turning it off.

  So far, I’m keeping it off for my media drives, even though some have journaling on for media drives also. But, in my case, I don’t have any extra speed to spare.

  PowerPC G5 DP2.3, 3.5GB DDR SDRAM, ATI X800XT, OSX.4.11, FCStudio2, Sonnet 5 Bay SATA (RAID or JBOD as needed), ACD 23″ & Sony NTSC Monitor via Matrox v.1
  Sony ZIU hdv, edited w.ProRes

Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up