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Friday, February 19, 2010

Mac drive formatting - to Journal or not

As a Mac user, I kind of thought I knew how to format my hard drives (and whether to use Journaling or not), and I had thought that you should use Journaling for system and "work" drives (i.e. valuable data), but for drives you're using for video editing, it's better not to use Journaling. What you lose in security, you gain in performance.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I was talking to someone who told me I should always Journal the drives.

Thankfully, Ken Stone's Final Cut Pro web site has an article "Formatting a Hard Drive for the Mac" and he lays down the law:
Journaling is essential for OS disks (boot drives), but for disks used for video media, used for editing purposes, Journaling is not advised, as it can affect the speed of data being written. For video media (scratch) drives you would want to select the Mac OS Extended, no journaling.
If you're not up on all the ins and outs of formatting and Journaling, definitely read the article for the Caveat emptor's.



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