Anyone still rocking HFS+?

[Black_Mage]

I am still using an external Western Digital Enclosure with a Thunderbolt 1 connection as an off-site storage device that uses HFS+. It requires an adapter to work with M-series Macs. When I bought it, 4 TB was a lot of storage, and I had no idea that Apple would abandon the Thunderbolt 1 port.

WD 4TB My Passport Pro Portable External Hard Drive - Thunderbolt - WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN

WD WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN WD My Passport Pro WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN DAS Array - 2 x HDD Supported - 4 TB Installed HDD Capacity - 2 x Total Bays - Thunderbolt - 0, 1, JBOD RAID Levels Portable Overview: With the unique design of an integrated Thunderbolt cable providing both power and performance, My P...

www.amazon.com

All my internal and external SSDs use APFS. I just don't see any advantage to converting the WD storage device to APFS.

 

[tonmischa]

APFS was designed for SSDs. It will work on spinning disks, but there will be performance problems.

Use HFS+ for spinning disks and APFS for SSDs.

 

[baconcat_8964]

An earlier article talked about how APFS affects HDD performance in a long term of use.

Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To

After 16 months of using and testing APFS—Apple's new file system—I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters).

eshop.macsales.com

I have several HDD for cold backups and Time Machine. All of them are on HFS+.

 

[Fishrrman]

I still use HFS+ on any and all drives where it's use is "not required" by the OS.

The OS requires that you use APFS on
- boot drives
- time machine backups (I don't use tm)
- CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper cloned backups.

BUT... on EVERYTHING else, I still use HFS+.
On SSDs and HDDs.
I'll continue to use it, so long as I can still do so.
I guess that's just me.

 

[VaZ]

There simply aren't any great tools to repair APFS issues so i stick to HFS+ and use DiskWarrior to repair all issues when they arise. Not to mention full clones are easy with HFS+. My Mojave is rocking a 4 x 400GB RAID HFS+ startup drive.

 

[rin67630]

The OS requires that you use APFS on
- boot drives...

Almost true: The OS requires that you use APFS on the boot partition of any OS >= Catalina.
The drive itself can carry other partitions with other formats.

 

[Fishrrman]

rin chided me with:
"The drive itself can carry other partitions with other formats."

Heh.
I'm the only Mac user you will ever meet who has hard-partitioned an m4 Mini internal SSD into four user partitions (not including the sealed system volume, etc.):
- Boot (APFS)
- Main (HFS+)
- Media (HFS+)
- Music (HFS+)

 

[Evil Lair]

Also using HFS+ for spinning drives, at least (if ever) APFS properly supports them. Apple's made it more difficult by pulling functionality from Disk Utility, so it's impossible to create an encrypted HFS drive unless you have an older Mac OS around.

 

[Black_Mage]

it's impossible to create an encrypted HFS drive unless you have an older Mac OS around.

I didn't know that. Interesting. 🤔

 

[VitoBotta]

After reading this thread, I had reformatted an external hard drive I use with Carbon Copy Cloner to HFS+, but then CCC told me to reformat as APFS, otherwise, snapshots would not be supported.... So I switched to APFS again.

 

[Fishrrman]

CCC (and I will guess that SuperDuper, as well) now require the backup to be in APFS.

At one time (going 'way back to Mojave, I think) you COULD create an HFS+ backup using CCC or SD.
But... no more.

 

[gilby101]

APFS was designed for SSDs. It will work on spinning disks, but there will be performance problems.

APFS works fine with HDD. More reliable and more flexible than HFS+ partitions.

There can be performance problems with a busy HDD. Just as there can be performance problems with a busy SSD which does not have TRIM.

My APFS HDDs perform fine for their main use - backups and media storage. I have not needed any HFS+ drives for many years except on my Mac Mini running High Sierra.

so i stick to HFS+ and use DiskWarrior to repair all issues when they arise

Apart from hardware problems, I have never had issues with APFS format. So no need for DiskWarrior if you use APFS.

but then CCC told me to reformat as APFS, otherwise, snapshots would not be supported

There you go - snapshots are another reason to use APFS.

 

[tonmischa]

APFS works fine with HDD. More reliable

Please elaborate on reliability.

 

[weckart]

Also using HFS+ for spinning drives, at least (if ever) APFS properly supports them. Apple's made it more difficult by pulling functionality from Disk Utility, so it's impossible to create an encrypted HFS drive unless you have an older Mac OS around.

Is that no longer possible using command line tools? I thought you could still create encrypted HFS+ bundles using the hdiutil command.

 

[gilby101]

Please elaborate on reliability.

1. File system integrity. "One key feature in APFS that makes errors highly improbable is its use of copy-on-write for all file system metadata. This ensures that changes made to the file system are almost guaranteed to remain consistent, even when suddenly interrupted." (from https://eclecticlight.co/2025/01/09/why-use-apfs/). Journalling (the + in HFS+) was always an add-on to HFS. APFS was designed for the start as a robust file system.

2. Snapshots for Time Machine and other backup software. Gets over the fragility of directory hard links used by TM on HFS+ disks.

In practice these ensure that the file system is almost never corrupted by unexpected events like application or system crashes or by sudden disk disconnection.

 

[bogdanw]

I use HFS+

APFS only for what is required (Macintosh HD), HFS+ for the data I care about.

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/disc-utility-warning.2376773/
https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...rnal-hdd.2386349/?post=32089488#post-32089488
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/help-with-69845-disk-utility-error.2420636/

Besides being prone to (unfixable) errors, APFS is also incredibly insecure and Apple has hidden most vulnerabilities by using ambiguous language and brief descriptions.

APFS search in CVE Records https://www.cve.org/CVERecord/SearchResults?query=APFS

CVE-2022-32832 APFS “An app with root privileges may be able to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges”https://support.apple.com/102891
https://www.cve.org/CVERecord?id=CVE-2022-32832

CVE-2024-27848 “A malicious app may be able to gain root privileges”
https://support.apple.com/120903
“Create a new APFS volume …” https://www.kandji.io/blog/macos-audit-story-part3

 

[rin67630]

APFS works fine with HDD. More reliable and more flexible than HFS+ partitions.

You don't appear to know about what you are writing. APFS will fragment your HDD to death.

 

[rin67630]

Duplicate, please ignore.

 

[AdamBuker]

I use HFS+ on two of my external SSDs as I will use them with both my Apple Silicon macs and my PowerPC macs. This will probably be even more important for me as Tahoe is set to drop AFP support completely and I don't really want to set up another Mac to be an intermediary server if I don't have to.

 

[rin67630]

HFS+ is the secret trick to rejuvenate an iMac with large fusion drives, without need to open it !
APFS is a HDD killer; it will fragment it until your iMAC feels like a snail on sandpaper.

The solution is to split the FD into a large HD formatted with HFS+ and and small 121 GB SSD-blade.

Install macOS on the SSD-blade, then comes the trick:
copy the user folder to the HDD and edit the user moving it's location to the HDD.
All user data will then expand on the HDD and the SSD-blade will stay at ~5ß% occupation.

Beside that the SSD, carrying the System and the application, which are mainly read, will not wear.
As a Fusion Drive accelerator, it was permanently hammered with writes wearing it really fast.

 

[ipedro]

Apart from hardware problems, I have never had issues with APFS format. So no need for DiskWarrior if you use APFS.

There are threads on here and on support forums all over the internet with people who've had unrepairable issues from the supposedly self healing APFS.

I've had it happen twice already. Using an external APFS drive with an iPad Pro, which doesn't have an eject drive function, unplugging it then plugging into a Mac, eventually corrupted the APFS drive. Disk Warrior of course doesnt support APFS rebuilds, though I did find a tool (iboysoft) that was capable of reading the unstructured content on the drive and getting my data off of it.

I wish APFS were as unbreakable as people often insist it is, but it clearly is not. Having a tool like DiskWarrior was peace of mind before APFS. Now if your drive corrupts and Disk Utility can't fix it, you're simply screwed.

 

[Project Alice]

I use it for anything that isn't a boot drive or an SSD. I also have tons of PPC and early intel macs, and a few 68ks. HFS+ works on almost all of them.

 

[rin67630]

I use it for anything that isn't a boot drive or an SSD. I also have tons of PPC and early intel macs, and a few 68ks. HFS+ works on almost all of them.

...and HFS+ has drivers for Linux and Windows.

 

[WriteNow]

It's very possible that all my Macs only have HFS (HFS, not HFS+). They are all a bit on the elderly side... 😆

If only I had a pre-Plus Mac, I could talk about the joys of MFS. 😆

 

[WriteNow]

An earlier article talked about how APFS affects HDD performance in a long term of use.

Thanks for sharing that! It was interesting and good information to know.