I have a 4 GB 2.5" WD HDD (probably older model) that seems to quit working if I allow Time Machine to format APFS on one of its partitions. As mentioned before, it probably depends upon your situation and the particular HDD.
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APFS or MacOS Extended for HDD?
- Thread starter Filocullen
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Exactly. Besides, anyone concerned about performance probably should not be using spinning disks anyhow.
SSD's are not a viable option, if cost is a factor, when you are dealing with terabytes of data.
Over time, an HDD formatted using APFS can start to slow down if the files on it are changed — Edited files on an APFS volume which uses HDDs will get slower each time they are modified.
“This long delay when reading large files is the reason I don’t recommend using APFS on HDDs. This delay will only occur with files which have been written to a lot, and if the file has been copied or the volume has a snapshot.”
source: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/43043-using-apfs-on-hdds-and-why-you-might-not-want-to/
“This long delay when reading large files is the reason I don’t recommend using APFS on HDDs. This delay will only occur with files which have been written to a lot, and if the file has been copied or the volume has a snapshot.”
source: https://eshop.macsales.com/blog/43043-using-apfs-on-hdds-and-why-you-might-not-want-to/
My wife's 2012 MBP forced me to 'upgrade' it to AFPS when I installed High Sierra a number of years ago.
All was fine for a while, but after a few months, life was a bit of a misery, especially after first booting from shut-down. Basically the machine was unusuable for the first ten minutes after booting, while the HDD sat there gronking to itself. Try to launch anything during that time and the icon would just sit there bouncing away, followed by the dreaded 'spinning beachball of death', even something basic like Safari.
Replacing the HDD with an SSD fixed all those problems.
In a nutshell, AFPS is fundamentally incompatible with HDDs.
All was fine for a while, but after a few months, life was a bit of a misery, especially after first booting from shut-down. Basically the machine was unusuable for the first ten minutes after booting, while the HDD sat there gronking to itself. Try to launch anything during that time and the icon would just sit there bouncing away, followed by the dreaded 'spinning beachball of death', even something basic like Safari.
Replacing the HDD with an SSD fixed all those problems.
In a nutshell, AFPS is fundamentally incompatible with HDDs.
One other thing about using HFS+ on platter-based hard drives instead of APFS.
You can still use 3rd-party maintenance/recovery apps with HFS+.
With APFS -- almost certainly not.
For instance, if you keep a drive in HFS+, you can periodically defragment it when needed.
And... if by chance the drive got corrupted (in software), you could use "data recovery apps" such as Data Rescue on it. Again, impossible with APFS.
If the platter-based drive is to be a boot drive, well, now you don't have a choice. It MUST be APFS.
But for data-only drives (not intended to be bootable) -- HFS+ is still the formatting to use.
You can still use 3rd-party maintenance/recovery apps with HFS+.
With APFS -- almost certainly not.
For instance, if you keep a drive in HFS+, you can periodically defragment it when needed.
And... if by chance the drive got corrupted (in software), you could use "data recovery apps" such as Data Rescue on it. Again, impossible with APFS.
If the platter-based drive is to be a boot drive, well, now you don't have a choice. It MUST be APFS.
But for data-only drives (not intended to be bootable) -- HFS+ is still the formatting to use.
I adopted APFS for hdd's when I upgraded to Monterey. My experience: failed formats, needed 2 or 3 tries. Failed backups. Moved from volumes within containers back to partitions. Fewer but still too many issues. Went back to HFS and discrete partitions: everything was fine. Drives are enterprise grade Toshiba's with light use. Apple introduced APFS in 2017 and it’s still not fully documented and hardly robust. Another area of ignored core functionality while it seems there’s plenty of time & resources to develop “new features”. I’ll use it for ssd's but avoid it for hdd's.
If you want to use encryption though then APFS is the only choice on macOS Big Sur and later (perhaps even Catalina, I do not know). It is not possible to create encrypted CoreStorage volumes with HFS+ on these systems, though they can still be used normally otherwise.
My impression is that Apple seems to treat HFS+ as a deprecated format now, so be mindful that Apple may continue to remove support for it over time.
My impression is that Apple seems to treat HFS+ as a deprecated format now, so be mindful that Apple may continue to remove support for it over time.
I also concur that HFS+ is better for HDDs.
NOTE: HFS+ maximum date support is the year 2040(!), but I'm guessing all CONSUMERS will be using SSDs exclusively by then, but I'm guessing servers will continue to use them far longer.
Source:
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/2040_date_limit
NOTE: HFS+ maximum date support is the year 2040(!), but I'm guessing all CONSUMERS will be using SSDs exclusively by then, but I'm guessing servers will continue to use them far longer.
Source:
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/2040_date_limit
Last edited:
Using HFS+ on Big Sur or Monterey on a hard drive boot disk is another issue that is definitely not much fun. By way of comparison, please see the the results Howard Oakley found in his tests at Which SSDs can you boot your M1 Mac from? Do hard disks work too?
Obviously a very small sample size. My 2.5” Seagate hdd clones will boot my M1 MBA on Monterey. With my 3.5” Toshiba's, SuperduperDuper will fail to make a clone of a disk containing an OS. So I haven’t been able to boot off the Toshiba hdd. Yet it will clone data partitions and User directories just fine. Both drives get erased every time I attempt a clone. Identical workflow, one works the other does not. No idea. As I said earlier, this 5 year old and ongoing development of a file system leaves much to be desired.
I have this exact same question. I've just acquired a 2014 Mac Mini to use as a local backup / store for my family's iCloud accounts. It will live in a cupboard and not be in daily use.
The Mac Mini has a 128GB SSD for the OS, and I installed a 4TB internal HDD for storage.
That 4TB HDD is partitioned into 1.5TB HFS+ for all our Home Folders (local copy of our 2TB iCloud Family account) and 2.5TB APFS for Time Machine backups of the Home Folders partition.
It's early days, but it seems to be working so far. I was wondering whether to make the 1.5TB partition also APFS.
Based on the evidence in this thread and what I can find elsewhere , there seems no strong case for making the entire HDD APFS. I think I will leave things as they are.
(One further change might be to use Super Duper or CCC to make bootable backups on the 2.5TB partition rather than rely on Time Machine.)
The Mac Mini has a 128GB SSD for the OS, and I installed a 4TB internal HDD for storage.
That 4TB HDD is partitioned into 1.5TB HFS+ for all our Home Folders (local copy of our 2TB iCloud Family account) and 2.5TB APFS for Time Machine backups of the Home Folders partition.
It's early days, but it seems to be working so far. I was wondering whether to make the 1.5TB partition also APFS.
Based on the evidence in this thread and what I can find elsewhere , there seems no strong case for making the entire HDD APFS. I think I will leave things as they are.
(One further change might be to use Super Duper or CCC to make bootable backups on the 2.5TB partition rather than rely on Time Machine.)
There's an old saying that it's easy to make backups, anyone can do it, but it's difficult to restore them.
Not sure that is a good idea. What risks are you trying to cover? For example:
- Someone accidentally deletes some files in their home folder - all good.
- HDD fails - no backup!
For this project I decided not to use an external drive. Trying to keep things tidy. Nothing stopping me copying over the home folders to an external drive every now and then though.
So, before I started this project, only the most recently used files existed in two places - on laptop and on iCloud. All the the older stuff existed solely on iCloud (which is a sync service not a backup). I was really uncomfortable with this situation.
With the Mac Mini acting as local storage:
* If the Mac Mini / HDD fails, all the files are still on iCloud no problem.
* If iCloud fails or gets corrupted or Apple shuts down, we have a local copy of all our stuff on the Mac Mini.
* All the most recently used files also exist locally (third copy) on the family's various laptops.
It may not strictly meet the definition of having 3 independent copies of the data in two places, but it's close enough for me for now. And it's easy for me to add an external HDD in future.
Ok, you have clearly thought about potential disasters and how to survive them with what works for you. (Forgive me if that sounds patronising.)
That was my thinking once as well, and I wound up regretting that when "every now and then" got further and further apart until I had a failure and lost 6 months of work.
Ouch! Seems you didn't have that backed up elsewhere. My condolences.
Similar happened at my workplace a few years ago. IT consultant set up a backup system for us using 3 HDDS + an external HDD that staff took home weekly. What he didn't tell us: He had RAIDed the 3 HDDs together, then split the pool into two, one for server OS and one for company data, then set up a cacky backup to external HDD app which was alway failing and throwing errors. When one HDD failed, my boss said 'no probs, data HDD is RAIDed, just rebuild it.' Nope. Cack RAID drivers couldn't rebuild it with just 2 HDDs. The whole system was toast. The backups were toast.
We complained to the IT company. I gather that they paid for data recovery as it was their cockup. They'd made the server 3x more vulnerable to HDD issues than before they touched it.
Anyway. In my case, I have the previous few month's info in 4 places: on laptop; in iCloud; on the Mac Mini; and on Time Machine.
However, looking at points of vulnerability: the laptop and iCloud sync with each other so a corruption in one could affect the other; the Mac Mini folders and Time Machine backup are on the same drive so a HDD failure could affect both.
So I actually only have 2 truly independent copies, and I'm aware of that. TBH I'm relatively happy - it's 100% better than before I got the Mac Mini, when most of my data only existed in iCloud and not even on my space-limited laptop.
Backing up my home folders to an external HDD to create a third copy, I'm fine with only doing that once every 6 months or so.
Edit: changed rightfully deserved swearwords to something that hopefully passes profanity filter
I’ve just done a speed test on both HFS+ and APFS with my very old Seagate GoFlex Desk HDD 3TB external drive on Macbook pro 2012 non retina Catalina OS SSD sata internal drive, the APFS showed a great speed result, it’s significantly faster than all other formats (Despite some people on this forum said it’s slower):
I record times I copy in/out files of a folder (71GB full of small pictures and videos files from my mobile phone), it’s data transferring between that old HDD external drive and my SSD internal drive. Here is the results:
NTFS:
8:57m to copy out ==>131MBps
ExFat:
11m to copy in/out ==> 106MBps
APFS:
7:44m copy in
8:40m copy out
==> 147MBps
HFS+:
9:56m copy in
12:44m copy out
APFS’ve made my MBP’s transferring speed ~ 45% faster than ExFat and HFS+, it’s a lot! I just wonder about what other people said in this post that APFS gonna make people’s HDD degraded over time, but all I can see by now is that it’s much faster than HFS+ and provide more intelligent abilities. Is the rumor true about the degradation?
I record times I copy in/out files of a folder (71GB full of small pictures and videos files from my mobile phone), it’s data transferring between that old HDD external drive and my SSD internal drive. Here is the results:
NTFS:
8:57m to copy out ==>131MBps
ExFat:
11m to copy in/out ==> 106MBps
APFS:
7:44m copy in
8:40m copy out
==> 147MBps
HFS+:
9:56m copy in
12:44m copy out
APFS’ve made my MBP’s transferring speed ~ 45% faster than ExFat and HFS+, it’s a lot! I just wonder about what other people said in this post that APFS gonna make people’s HDD degraded over time, but all I can see by now is that it’s much faster than HFS+ and provide more intelligent abilities. Is the rumor true about the degradation?
I believe it is. A very/fairly active APFS drive is liable to become fragmented over time. So probably not a good idea for a system disk. But I find it fine for backups and other data.
Never mind the performance, for me the killer features of APFS are: a) volumes sharing the whole disk (Gone are the contortions required when HFS partitions needed size changes or additional partitions), and b) more robust file system (e.g. disconnected cable less likely to cause problems).
And fandom.com is s site with fake information and lots of it.I also concur that HFS+ is better for HDDs.
NOTE: HFS+ maximum date support is the year 2040(!), but I'm guessing all CONSUMERS will be using SSDs exclusively by then, but I'm guessing servers will continue to use them far longer.
Source:
https://apple.fandom.com/wiki/2040_date_limit
Yes newly created TM backups have to be case sensitive APFS. not sure exactly when this change happened but TM backups setup as HFS before the change still work as HFS.