Do I need to format a new FireWire drive before using with FCP?

Hello,

Can anyone advise me on how do I need to format a brand new OWC FireWire drive before using with FCP?

thank you.

Open disk utility (Applications > Utilities > Disk Utility), select the drive in the left hand menu, then select the 'erase' tab, and set it to be Mac Os Extended (not journaled). Then erase the drive.

Journaling keeps a tiny reference of where everything is on the spinning platters in addition to the normal drive housekeeping. It makes the drive much more robust in the face of damage and failures.

The System drive probably should be journaled for safety, but it gets in the way of data, media, and external drives since it does take extra time.

Koz

Journaling is a function that is only valuable on the system startup drive. Journaling in UNIX, is a defeatable function (on-off) that saves a running log file of the condition of the running processes and their data on the system drives. This is only valuable when the system crashes or one of the processes running exits permaturely. When the system starts up again after a "hang-crash" situation, UNIX can access this log files and deal with the improperly exited processes. Without Journaling, the startup would take the time to verify the intergrity or each mounted volume and all the processes that were in memory, last runtime.

Journaling essentially, save you startup time.


You do NOT need to turn Journaling on on the Firewire drive, and it is best to initialize it on your computer before using it.