MongoDB disk operations with journaling disabled
There are two primary methods for WiredTiger to ensure the durability of your data: journaling and checkpointing.

Checkpoints store the valid and consistent state of the whole database. Should the server crash for any reason, it can restart from the last checkpoint in a consistent state. WiredTiger by default checkpoints the database every 60 seconds.

Journals store the writes that happened in-between checkpoints. If the database crashed between checkpoints, the journal data will be replayed on top of the last known good checkpoint. The journal is persisted to disk every 50 ms. The journaling process is optimized to be a lot more lightweight compared to checkpoints (and it also does a lot less work), so it's typically much faster than a checkpoint.

If journaling is disabled, the behaviour is slightly different between a mongod running in standalone mode or in replica set mode:


MongoDB 3.6.4 standalone with journaling disabled: only the complete state of the whole database is written to disk on every checkpoint. That is, if your database crashes between checkpoints, you can potentially lose the last 60 seconds of your writes (if using default checkpoint timing values).
MongoDB 3.6.4 replica set with journaling disabled: by design, a replica set requires more durability since it must record every operation in the oplog and ensure that the oplog is safely persisted. Thus, it will perform a checkpoint on every write instead. This will slow down the replica set tremendously.


The tradeoff you make by disabling journaling:


In a standalone deployment, since the main goal of a database is to persist your data, limiting disk usage (space or IOPS) will result in more data being lost between allowed writes. However, it's not recommended to run a standalone MongoDB for production purposes.
In a replica set, the write process is considerably slowed down due to the need to persist the oplog. This will also make the deployment use more disk IOPS. In the future versions of MongoDB, running a replica set with no journal will not be allowed (see SERVER-30347).


For more information regarding journaling, please see the Journaling Process page.