Aqua-Soft ForumsYou know how in cocktail they have the options of Journaling and Prebinding? what do these do..?? Should i force Prebinding and enable Journaling? thx. 
enable Journaling?
I think Contra is the one who should answer the question 
Contraaa! Help me 
This is what I know about journaling. It helps to make your file system more error proof but it puts a speed hit on your system when enabled.
so it enhances my file system but eats up more CPU? eek.
Yeah that's what I read in all the mac sites that talk about it. I think it's more for servers actually.
btw, ax0r... ever heard of PM?
I think journaling file systems make a log (Journal) of all changes to the file system.
If something goes wrong, the error can be removed by looking in the journal
ofcourse taha, but i thought it was better to thread the question for other people to post and learn. Maybe other people had the same question. =)
Journaling File System: It makes a database of the entire system and its contents and is constantly writing and reading from this database, or journal. Because of this, there is a log of every single thing that is on that system, so in the event of an improper shutdown (or power outage,etc.) you can't "lose" data. The reason for the quotes is that data is never really going to be gone if something happens, but the non-journaled file system will have no idea what data was written to the hard drive during the erronious shutdown, so a scandisk would have to be done to correct that data logs. So a journalized file system prevents having to "Scandisk", the downside is that it takes up some CPU, A LOT of disk space (about 12% of disk for NTFS), and some RAM. Its well worth it though, and it makes sure your never gonna have data curroption.
Prebinding: Is data that is part of OS X programs that tells what is needed to run that program (libraries, space,etc). It is run when you try to run a program, before the application actually launches. Because it has this central system of dependancies,applications start faster , because they dont need to search for all the needed files every startup, they just look at the prebinding.
haha contra i was waiting for your reply..
So journaling is sort of like a failsafe.. incase your computer crashes or you shut down improperly.. But, Macs dont have scandisk, so how would this affect my boot up? Does the computer run something when i first boot it up? (on the grey screen with the apple) or what? =)
yet again Contra displays his UNIX knowledge..
Journalizing is not part of the OS, its part of the filesystem. Macs only let you use one type of Filesystem, and that filesystem is journalized, so theres no scandisk needed. Yes the journal runs at startup, in fact hundreds of things do, Apple just chose not to show you.
If you remember on pre win2000, if you shut down the computer improperly,that blue scandisk screen would come up, thats b/c the system isnt journalized. Right now though Win2000+(NTFS), Linux(EXT3,Reiser), and OSX(?) are all journalized.
Now heres a question for the mac-ers out there. Could someone tell me the name of the Mac file system that OS X uses, because I thought that macs just used the BSD file system (as they are BSD based), which is NOT journalized (though its has something just as good,background snapshots), so this could clear up some of my confusion if someone could tell me.
on Get Info for my Harddrive it says Mac OS Extended File System
OK, a little googling around told me that Macs use the mac-only FS: HFS+ by default. Thats what that "extended" is for, if it said "Standard", that would be regular HFS, which was used pre OS8.
You can also use UFS in OSX. This seems to be an older system (ie. less modern features), but it is UNIX-like, with forward slashes, and is case sensitive, and symlinks (yay!). It is a version of the UNIX File System (as I thought). But it doesnt have the newest unix file system features (snapshots,data forks). It is also pretty useless w/ OS9.
Apple actually has a whole "book" on this on their developers site.
mmmm......google.
Here is my educated guess. If anyone notices a flaw in my logic, you are welcome to respond.
When you set up a Mac drive or reinstall a complete system, it gives you 2 or 3 choices depending on the OS you're using. Mac OS Standard, Mac OS Extended and Unix File System or UFS. Mac OSX almost always gets installed into OS Extended format because of its greater compatibilty with software and external hardware.
Oh, I just noticed contra's reply to his question... oh well
Hieretical File System <---- Yes yes!!
Yeah GameBoyzGB, your right. So, Mac OS Extended is an enchanced modded version of the UFS ?
"extended" is an advanced version of HFS (not ufs), HFS is their old file system (used pre OS8), and HFS+ is the update to that.
Personally, I would go with UFS (but thats me), because you sacrafice a little performace for the great unix system structure. I could never get used to typeing :contrasutrasstuff:folder:folder:file , i like /home/contrasutra/folder/file. mmmm......hierarchy. You also get compatability w/ other unices.
Heres a question: does HFS+ have file by file permissions? And does HFS+ fragment, I know UFS doesnt.
Mac OS X copled with HFS+ has file permisions (ithink)
HFS+ does have file by file permissions. You can find them in the "get info" dialog.
HFS+ also does fragment although not as wildly as microsoft windows does.
Nothing fragments as much as Windows. Why does it fragment though? I guess Apple got MS-syndrome and just revamped an old program, leaving behind legacy problems (fragmentation). Ahhhh....stupidity.