Is it posssible to downgrade a journaled filesystem?

Question

When I got my Drobo disk drive[1], little was published on setting it up for use with Airport Extreme. Since that time, the information has gotten better and I've found that I should not have formatted the drive "Mac OS Extended (Journaled)," but rather as "Mac OS Extended."
Since I've now got 700G of data on the drive, I can't move it all, reformat, and copy back. So, my question is: "Is there a way to downgrade the filesystem from '(Journaled)' to just plain 'Mac OS Extended?'"
Note [1]: Semi-RAID, four disk (max 1TB each) device made by Data Robotics, Inc.

Answer 1

I will try your suggestion and report back as to whether it is an "answer."
In response to your question, "where is your information coming from?", I'm not sure what you mean. Was I expected to footnote my question with corroborative references? Although I could easily do that (having spent 1.5 days researching the issue), anyone could Google-up pages of references. Suffice it to say that I had an otherwise well-behaved drive become corrupted after it had spent a couple of months "chumming it up" with an AirPort Extreme. Certainly my receipt of purchase from the fine folks at Alsoft (DiskWarrior) would lend credence to my observation of filesystem corruption.
If you are challenging my implication that the AirPort Extreme (AEX)-Journaled USB drive is the cause of the corruption, let me say this: I have found the AEX to be my most disappointing Apple purchase ever. I returned the original purchase for a replacement because the device seemed incapable of maintaining an uninterrupted connection with a MacBook Pro (MBP) that was positioned less than 20' from it and with nothing between them except one 3/8" thick wallboard and one 3/4" cedar paneling. The replacement model has been less unreliable, but less than 4% as reliable as a cheap WAP I'd purchased 5 years ago. The device simply drops out of the network when the activity is high. Sounds like a bug to me! Once it's dropped out, it starts a password challenge for which I lack a sufficiently high level of omniscience to overcome. I'm not sure what it thinks the password is, but it's not what I set. Resetting the device is the only remedy.
I believe that the AEX's "flakiness" is at the root of the corruption. If the wireless connection from my MBP to the AEX is analogous to the USB cable from my disk to the AEX, then one would not be surprised to hear that I'd had filesystem corruption from periodically yanking the USB cable out of my MBP while I was engaged in heavy filesystem activity. If the analogy is flawed, then the AEX is smarter than I thought. However, if the AEX is taking proxy responsibility for the USB cable, you would think you'd have more options in the "AirPort Disk" utility.
Perhaps journaling itself is meant to handle an unreliable connection to the mass storage device, but it wouldn't surprise me to learn that the QA folks didn't spend a month or two yanking the cable. Regardless, just what the AEX is telling the drive and/or Darwin when it gets "antisocial," who knows?
Thanks for your suggestion, though. I understand that you have "never heard of any negative effects of journaling an air disk," but the fact that you "don't have an Airport Extreme" may be partially responsible for your incredulity. I suggest you purchase one, add a drive, put 700G of information on it, and then sit in anxious worry over whether or not you're ever going to see that data again. The experience really opens one's eyes