Drive Setup for DP

schop · Post by **schop** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 1:25 pm

I always thought that for the best performance you should not choose "Journaled" when formatting your audio drive. Is this wrong? I spoke with MOTU tech support today and they said that Journaling should be on. How do you set up your audio drive?

TheHopiWay · Post by **TheHopiWay** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 2:14 pm

I set journalling off on all the drives except my os drive.

MIDI Life Crisis · Post by **MIDI Life Crisis** » Tue Jan 10, 2006 2:52 pm

I set journalling "on" on all the drives. Never a problem.

boggsale · Post by **boggsale** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 5:20 pm

I too have my drives setup with journaling off. This is mostly for compatability with Pro Tools, but it makes sense to me. Journaling adds what seems to me to be unecessary disk i/o activity to an already i/o intensive activity (namely, recording audio data). just my $0.02

schop · Post by **schop** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 6:51 pm

I also logically believe that it would create additional disk activity...but MOTU Tech Support said yes. Anybody else have a comment on this. Tech support said that DP is designed to work with it on.

Splinter · Post by **Splinter** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 6:56 pm

Just so you know, you can turn journaling ON or OFF in Disk Utility at any time, not just during formating.

aafarr2 · Post by **aafarr2** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 7:44 pm

Forgive my stupidity, but what is an audio drive?

Also, what is journalling?

azusa749a · Post by **azusa749a** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 9:14 pm

Splinter wrote:Just so you know, you can turn journaling ON or OFF in Disk Utility at any time, not just during formating.

How can I do that? Would you explain? It'd be really appreciated.
When I installed Tiger, there's only one selection: Mac OS extend (journal).

bjmorgan · Post by **bjmorgan** » Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:19 pm

azusa749a wrote:How can I do that? Would you explain? It'd be really appreciated. When I installed Tiger, there's only one selection: Mac OS extend (journal).

Journaling is enabled by default on clean installs of Tiger on Extended disks. Quoteth the Apple help:

"If you have Mac OS X version 10.4 installed on your computer and your hard disk is formatted Mac OS Extended, journaling is turned on.

If you upgrade from Mac OS X version 10.3 and your disk is formatted Mac OS Extended, journaling may be turned on.

If you upgrade to Mac OS X version 10.4 from a version of Mac OS X earlier than version 10.3, journaling is not turned on. It's recommended that you turn on journaling."

azusa749a · Post by **azusa749a** » Thu Jan 12, 2006 11:49 am

Thanks bjmorgan.

jonotron · Post by **jonotron** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 11:53 am

what does journalling do?

Resonant Alien · Post by **Resonant Alien** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 12:47 pm

jonotron wrote:what does journalling do?

It keeps a log (e.g. "journal") of everything that gets written to or deleted from your hard drive. It is used to speed up data recovery in the case that something ever happened to your data and you needed to restore it.

Since it is an extra operation that occurs with every read or write to or from the disk, it obviously has an impact on the performance you see. How much of an impact and how big of a deal that impact is really depends on the application you are using and how close to the razor's edge you are running.

If you are buzzing along with only a few tracks, it probably won't matter. But if you are pushing a lot of tracks and you are getting close to maxing out the throughput of the drive bus, then those extra few operations that are required by journaling could push you over the edge and cause the "HD cannot keep up" error.

In general, I leave journaling on for my OS drive, but turn it off for my DP audio data drive. I see no real reason to have journaling on for your audio drive anyway since you are making daily backups of your audio files after every session.......you are making daily backups of your audio files aren't you?

Rolastro · Post by **Rolastro** » Fri Jan 13, 2006 1:19 pm

Last week my worst nightmare came true - hard drive failure. This wasn't on my main Audio drive but I did have 50G worth of data (on a 90GB partition of a 160GB drive) that was only partially backed up. The good news was that I was able to recover most of the data using Disk Warrior to salvage the drives integrity and then FileSalvage to recover the data files on the disk. While I was in the process of doing so, I was on the phone with Alsoft support, and they said to me that it was a good thing I had journaling turned on - otherwise much of the data would have been lost or corrupted.

I have no idea how much having Journaling turned on affects a hard drive's performance, but I've decided that for me its worth it from now on to have Journaling enabled.

Lesson of the day - back your sh-t up!.

pcm · Post by **pcm** » Sun Jan 15, 2006 7:40 am

boggsale wrote:I too have my drives setup with journaling off. This is mostly for compatability with Pro Tools, but it makes sense to me. Journaling adds what seems to me to be unecessary disk i/o activity to an already i/o intensive activity (namely, recording audio data). just my $0.02

If you check the Digi compatibility pages, you will see that they recommend that journaling be left ON for audio drives now (as well as boot disc).

MOTUnation.com

Drive Setup for DP

Drive Setup for DP

Re: Drive Setup for DP

Me too

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