Seagate 500 GB eSATA

[J. Tad newberry]

it didn’t seem a whole lot faster than my FW LaCie 500 GB external, so i tried a file transfer test. the Seagate eSATA transferred about 23% faster than the LaCie, but playback of QT files showed the biggest difference. on the LaCie, QTs play back with a blackbox flicker, but they play fine and clean on the Seagate. also, i formatted the Seagate with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) like my system and media drives, but the LaCie had been formatted Mac OS Extended [non-journaled]…though i have no idea what difference that makes. just thought i would share this info for anyone who’s interested…

[Jason Porthouse]

Mortimer,

I do believe the accepted wisdom is to ensure media drives are NOT journalled – I think it’s OK when they’re barely full but will have a serious impact on performance when they start getting a little more crowded and they will, quickly)…

Jason

[J. Tad newberry]

that is good info. i will go back and reformat my two journaled drives. do you know specifically what problems i might entail if i leave them as “journaled”? i’ve had two media drives journaled for almost 2 years now, but maybe that is the source of some of my problems…

[Jason Porthouse]

None specifically that I know of, just passing on the percieved wisdom… I’m cutting on a system that has a mix of journalled and unjournalled media drives. I would be inclined, if you are ever in a position to do so, to re-format your media drives – it’s a good thing to do once in a while anyway, so if you can without too much disruption then do (turning journalling off of course). Journalling is fine for system drives BTW.

If you’re cutting DV, ingesting via firewire and you’re using FW drives without a separate FW card installed (separating the buses for ingest and data to the drives) then this may be a source of other problems – though many people do exactly this and never encounter problems. There seems to be a certain amount of voodoo with drive configurations, so make a sacrifice to whatever god of editors you believe in and keep em crossed!

Seriously though, by following the ‘best’ wisdom on here you stand the best chance of having no problems. So journalling off for media drives, and separate buses for firewire ingest and storage drives is the way to go. I’m sure others with more intimate knowledge of the pros and cons of journalling will chime in if I’m way off beam 😉

Jason

[Walter Biscardi]

[mortimer heathcliff] “hat is good info. i will go back and reformat my two journaled drives. do you know specifically what problems i might entail if i leave them as “journaled”? i’ve had two media drives journaled for almost 2 years now, but maybe that is the source of some of my problems…”

Journaling creates slower performance than Non-Journaled and media drives should never be formatted in Journaled.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Broadcast and independent productions.

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[David Smith]

It’s amazingly simple to find answers to these kinds of questions. A simple Google search for “OSX journaling” returns, as the very first hit, this link to the Apple website:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=107249

Which states:

“When you enable journaling on a disk, a continuous record of changes to files on the disk is maintained in the journal. If your computer stops because of a power failure or some other issue, the journal is used to restore the disk to a known-good state when the server restarts.

“With journaling turned on, the file system logs transactions as they occur….”

So, you can see how useful journaling can be, and also why it would slow down performance of a drive as your system tries to log each and every change made to every file on that drive.

Handy tool, that internet search.

[Sean Oneil]

[David Smith] ”
Handy tool, that internet search.”

Handy indeed. I just learned that you can disable journaling on a disk without re-formatting it.

Open Disk Utility, highlight the drive, hold down the option key and click “File”. You’ll see a hidden option to “Disable Journaling”.

Sean

[David Smith]

Talk about handy! Thanks Sean, that’s a neat trick.

Regards,
David