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AFS on HDD Drive?
- Thread starter kagharaht
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APFS support for HDDs and Fusion Drives will come in a future High Sierra update, that is, when it comes to installing High Sierra on an APFS formatted HDD. HOWEVER: You can actually convert your HDD drives right now to APFS. I converted two of mine this morning, I have 4 internal drives:
1 SSD running High Sierra (APFS)
1 HDD HFS+
2 HDD APFS
1 SSD running High Sierra (APFS)
1 HDD HFS+
2 HDD APFS
As for APFS on a boot HDD I assume it would work right now. I mean if you can boot from a non Fusion SSD what would be that different about a HDD? Performance could certainly be an issue. And it might be that High Sierra needs to be optimized for boot HDD drives running APFS. While I’m not OS expert, I would think it would work.
All that said, I’m not planning to convert my boot HDD to APFS now.
It doesn’t give me the option to convert my internal HDD. I can choose the external ones but it’s grayed out for my iMac internal HDD. Any suggestions?
In Disk Utility in the High Sierra installer are you choosing "Erase" after selecting the boot volume? From there you should see the full range of options including APFS.
Upon rereading your reply I see what you mean. No, I don't think Disk Utility will allow you to convert the boot volume. You need to format it as APFS at install.
[doublepost=1506577953][/doublepost]One option is to get Carbon Copy Cloner and back up your boot volume then boot to the clone and format the internal HDD as APFS and restore.
Word to the wise: if you intend on using encryption do not create an APFS encrypted volume but rather a non-encrypted APFS volume and then enable FileVault from the OS. Installing to an APFS encrypted volume has been shown to cause login problems and slower performance.
I have a Time Machine Backup on my AirPort Extreme AC via external USB Drive. Can I just create an Mac OS Sierra Installer via USB Flash Drive. Boot into that and format the internal HDD to APFS. Then restore from my Time Machine Backup? Or maybe I can boot into Recovery Mode and Convert the drive from there?
It makes sense that this is an option now that you mention it. Disk Utility obviously can't convert the volume the system is currently booted in to. This would be the best idea.
I installed APFS onto HD directly, on my 2010 Core i7 iMac. No conversion from HFS+ necessary but it was a clean install.
1. Made USB High Sierra installer.
2. Booted to USB installer.
3. Used Disk Utility on USB installer to format boot drive to APFS.
4. Installed High Sierra.
Worked fine and I now have an APFS install of High Sierra. No manual conversion necessary after the fact.
Total install size 11.3 GB. Boot times are reasonable for HD, well under one minute. Since it’s a clean install, disk access times are also reasonable - decent OS navigation speed. However, SSD is still way faster of course.
The only caveat is this method doesn’t produce a recovery partition for some strange reason. So I guess if you want a recovery partition, you’ll have to format as HFS+ then convert.
1. Made USB High Sierra installer.
2. Booted to USB installer.
3. Used Disk Utility on USB installer to format boot drive to APFS.
4. Installed High Sierra.
Worked fine and I now have an APFS install of High Sierra. No manual conversion necessary after the fact.
Total install size 11.3 GB. Boot times are reasonable for HD, well under one minute. Since it’s a clean install, disk access times are also reasonable - decent OS navigation speed. However, SSD is still way faster of course.
The only caveat is this method doesn’t produce a recovery partition for some strange reason. So I guess if you want a recovery partition, you’ll have to format as HFS+ then convert.
I have used a DIY Fusion Drive setup for a while now on my MacBook Pro 2011 with a 240GB SSD and 1TB HDD. I was going to hold off on upgrading until they added support for APFS Fusion Drives, but I decided to wipe my disks and setup another Fusion Drive with a clean install using HFS+ format.
1. downloaded High Sierra from App Store, created bootable USB (although I'm not even sure if that was necessary)
2. booted into Internet Recovery with Option-Command-R (as long as you're running 10.12.4 or higher this startup combo will install the latest version of macOS, in this case High Sierra)
3. used Recovery app Terminal to split my Fusion Drive, erase the disks, format new disks as HFS+, then recreate a Fusion Drive
4. rebooted by holding down option to the USB to clean install High Sierra (it was probably possible to skip this and just install High Sierra through Internet Recovery)
5. turned on FileVault after installation, during account setup
6. selected new external HDD for Time Machine, also formatted as HFS+, selected Encrypted Backups when it popped up
Anyway everything seems to be working fine. Performance does feel a bit slower than on Sierra but I'm assuming that's because I am not on APFS.
1. downloaded High Sierra from App Store, created bootable USB (although I'm not even sure if that was necessary)
2. booted into Internet Recovery with Option-Command-R (as long as you're running 10.12.4 or higher this startup combo will install the latest version of macOS, in this case High Sierra)
3. used Recovery app Terminal to split my Fusion Drive, erase the disks, format new disks as HFS+, then recreate a Fusion Drive
4. rebooted by holding down option to the USB to clean install High Sierra (it was probably possible to skip this and just install High Sierra through Internet Recovery)
5. turned on FileVault after installation, during account setup
6. selected new external HDD for Time Machine, also formatted as HFS+, selected Encrypted Backups when it popped up
Anyway everything seems to be working fine. Performance does feel a bit slower than on Sierra but I'm assuming that's because I am not on APFS.
APFS has native support for encryption, but I don’t know if that means it’s ensbled by default. I would turn off File Vault, just in case, worst case scenario you turn it back on. Also, having it off it may help with the conversion speed.
FileVault in High Sierra IS APFS encryption. There is no difference between the two. Since High Sierra's installer can non-destructively convert HFS+ volumes with FileVault enabled during upgrade installs without decryption, there should be no reason for you to have to turn off FileVault.
Well I tried and internal HDD grayed out while in recovery mode. So it won’t let me convert it. I just turned off FileVault a few hours ago and will try it again to see if it’s what preventing me from converting it.
Since some people are using the following command to keep their SSDs from being automatically converted to APFS during installation, I wonder if you could change it to YES and do the opposite.
You could try it from Terminal in High Sierra with the High Sierra installer downloaded.
You could try it from Terminal in High Sierra with the High Sierra installer downloaded.
Code:
/Applications/Install\ macOS\ High\ Sierra.app/Contents/Resources/startosinstall --converttoapfs NOIt took 3 days to decrypt Filevault. lol Anyway booted to Recover and nope, it doesn't let you convert internal HDD to APFS. It's grayed out. So that doesn't work. Will have to wait for the update from Apple to do it then. If they do it at all.
I have a MacPro 4,1 (early 2009) firmware upgraded to 5,1 HDD only, no SSD. I was able to clone my boot drive using 'Superduper!' so I have 2 identical boot drives. I then converted cloned drive to APFS but it will not boot. I get the following error:
