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How to disable journaling on ext4?

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 1:11 pm
by DriveR
Hello!
How to disable journaling on ext4?
On the Internet, a lot of different advice, but no one to MINT14

Re: How to disable journaling on ext4?

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2013 4:00 pm
by xenopeek
I wouldn't recommend doing that. The risk you take with your data files by disabling journaling isn't offset by any imagined physical life span extension of your SSD. This advice to disable journaling stems back to the days when cheap SSDs were often fake goods; basically compact flash cards with an IDE connector :| Modern SSDs do automatic wear leveling, so if you stick to reputable manufacturers this shouldn't be a worry for you. My SSD from Intel has been purring for 4 years now, without any sign of trouble. Same for my 3 year old SSD from OCZ.

To disable journaling, I would boot from your Linux Mint installation DVD / USB. That way you know you aren't using your partitions (as they aren't mounted). From there run the commands:

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tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdXY
e2fsck -f /dev/sdXY
Where you replace /dev/sdXY with your device name and number for the partition you want to disable journaling on. For example /dev/sda1 for the first partition on the first disk. If you don't know, run the following command to list your partitions:

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sudo parted -l
Before you do anything funky with your file system though, back up any important personal files!!!