Journaling... MBP much faster with it off?

[iBunny]

My new MBP seems to be much faster when Journaling is disabled… any reason why?

What does Journaling do anyway? Is it better to have it on or off?

 

[xUKHCx]

It is the way that jounaling work which causes the slow down. See this page. Journaling is enabled by default by apple so it is best to have it on as it gives an extra level of protection for the disk

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.

Or this page for more detailed information

 

[iBunny]

Disabling Journaling cut my boot time by 10 seconds, and the entire system seems much more responsive. When I turn it back on and restart, I add 10 seconds to my boot time, and moving files around and installing apps seems to take slightly longer.

 

[xUKHCx]

Disabling Journaling cut my boot time by 10 seconds, and the entire system seems much more responsive. When I turn it back on and restart, I add 10 seconds to my boot time, and moving files around and installing apps seems to take slightly longer.

It is a personal choice, but if you have time to measure boot time both with journaling on and off and post here you won't really miss those extra 10 seconds it takes to boot because you aren't short of time

In all seriousness I would leave it on as it the way apple chose to send you the system so I would take the experience of lots of testing and money spent on R&D.

 

[korndog2003]

how do you turn it on and off

 

[xUKHCx]

how do you turn it on and off

There is an icon in disk utility. However it is greyed out at the moment on mine.

 

[TBi]

What does Journaling do anyway? Is it better to have it on or off?

Journaling keeps a "journal" of all your hard drive reads and writes. Basically if you modify a file it will keep details on the modification until the file is fully written. Also if you move a file it will keep track of how much of the file has been moved from the origin and how much has been moved to the destination.

All this becomes useful if your computer crashes or the power gets cut. Instead of losing files because the OS doesn't remember what you were doing, it now has a journal or log of the last file operations in progress and can use this to correct any errors on the disk and/or finish copy/move operations that were in progress.

Basically with it turned on you are unlikely to lose data in a crash or power loss. With it turned on you are more likely to lose data in these scenarios.

I like my data... therefore i like journaling.

(FYI this is also one of the major differences between FAT and NTFS and the reason why people are less likely to lose data or have a dead system after a crash with XP than they would on 98)

 

[iBunny]

I use cocktail to turn it on and off. I found it interesting...

I accualy did this by accident and formatted my drive and left journaling disabled. I noticed the comptuer significantly faster... when i was checking some other things later on, I seen that Journaling was disabled. I used cocktail to enable it, and right away noticed a difference. I left journaling on for the better part of the week, still noticed slower performance. So I just turned it off, and you can see a significant difference.

I dont know if its because I have a 5400RPM laptop HDD? But, I am going to leave it off. I know that if the Laptop loses power, or crashes my data might not beable to be recovered, But I dont have anything other than music, and stuff on here anyway. I use this computer just for fun. Plus, this is a laptop, so I have a battery backup, along with a UPS its plugged into.

I am interested to hear others results with it on and off too...

Thanks

 

[xUKHCx]

Don't think many people will turn it on or off but it is just not that accessible to the novice user and the informed user will keep it on because it is the sensible thing to do.