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APFS vs external SSD in Thunderbolt enclosure?

allan.nyholm

allan.nyholm

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Nov 22, 2007
2,327
2,603
Aalborg, Denmark
So I downloaded the Public Beta for High Sierra and was curios to see if an upgrade to APFS would function with my homemade Fusion Drive containing of an external Samsung drive enclosed in a LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt enclosure and the built-in harddrive @ 7200 rpm inside my iMac.

Turns out that by checking the "convert to APFS"(my translation) button in the installer and doing an upgrade from a macOS Sierra installation that's been used quite a bit with csrutil disable and other things before being cleaned and only having csrutil disable on. Nothing else. I cleaned it up with the Maintenance app from TitaniumSoftware before running the macOS High Sierra. Just to say that I did my part in a trouble free install as possible.

However, after the installation program rebooted my Mac I learned that my iMac wouldn't boot because I was given the "no boot" sign after waiting for an hour or so for the installation to finish. The installation progress would switch between an actual installation time and an estimated progress time. That ended up with a "no boot" sign.

I tried many things within the installed High Sierra recovery partition that amazingly did get installed and nothing I could do with the 'diskutil apfs' command line did what is required to get back on track.

My installation was totally smashed and I ended up taking apart the fusion drive (which was also smashed) re-installing macOS Sierra 10.12.5 from a USB-stick. I installed macOS Sierra on the SSD from Samsung, as mentioned before. No Fusion Drive this time. I then again checked the box to convert the filesystem to APFS - I really wanted APFS as you might have known by now ;)

Nothing succeeded this time around either. The Mac wouldn't finish the installation here either - waiting and waiting for an hour again this time. I then tried one last time with the conversion to APFS after once again having reformatted the SSD back to HFS Extended Journaled. It would appear that when looking through the Disk Utility app on the USB with macOS Sierra that APFS was on it's way but spewed out an error.

The first look in the Terminal after my initial installation of macOS High Sierra yielded an error that I haven't written down. I remember that it failed to continue with the conversion.

So now that this is all over and I'm on the release version of macOS Sierra 10.12.5 - what are my options for converting the filesystem to APFS when High Sierra rolls out in final form?

My options are to wait and relax? I can do that. I just would like some input from other members that might have gone through the same as I.
 
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Were Fusion drives not mentioned in the guidelines as incompatible with APFS (as for now)?
 
lemonkid said:
Were Fusion drives not mentioned in the guidelines as incompatible with APFS (as for now)?
Click to expand...

They might have been. My later attempts to dismantle the Fusion Drive back to two separate disks didn't make the APFS filesystem conversion happen either. By default my Late 2015 iMac doesn't come with a Fusion Drive (just a 1TB 7200RPM harddisk). I'll just sit this one out and let time heal. I'll no doubt try to convert just the Samsung SSD to APFS after macOS High Sierra is released to the public in final form but for now I'd like to thank you for replying.
 
I had no problems updating my Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD to APFS.

So far it's really humming along in High Sierra.
 
DKZ said:
I had no problems updating my Lacie Rugged Thunderbolt SSD to APFS.

So far it's really humming along in High Sierra.
Click to expand...

Might be then that the reason I can't update my LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is that I have the replaced the internal SSD with a Samsung one!? I do experience slow boot on the drive too. Not when it's booting the OS but the initial startup from either reboot or cold start in the morning like today - takes a little while for the Mac to catch the external SSD and that's not something I've noticed very often. Might have to do with me replacing the drive some time ago to a brand that LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt doesn't like. Or just a dying Samsung SSD.
 
allan.nyholm said:
Might be then that the reason I can't update my LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt is that I have the replaced the internal SSD with a Samsung one!? I do experience slow boot on the drive too. Not when it's booting the OS but the initial startup from either reboot or cold start in the morning like today - takes a little while for the Mac to catch the external SSD and that's not something I've noticed very often. Might have to do with me replacing the drive some time ago to a brand that LaCie Rugged Thunderbolt doesn't like. Or just a dying Samsung SSD.
Click to expand...

I'm using a Samsung EVO 850 500GB in a OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini and booting MacOS from it. I've noticed too that booting is quick, but the time taken for the Apple logo to actually show up on screen is quite slow. This is on a late 2013 27" iMac so actually only Thunderbolt 1, however still far outdoes the SATA 6GB/s SSD.
Oddly, I also have a 250GB Samsung EVO 850 in the Thunderbay which I boot Windows 10 off of and it shows the windows logo almost instantly.
 
cbrand493 said:
I'm using a Samsung EVO 850 500GB in a OWC Thunderbay 4 Mini and booting MacOS from it. I've noticed too that booting is quick, but the time taken for the Apple logo to actually show up on screen is quite slow. This is on a late 2013 27" iMac so actually only Thunderbolt 1, however still far outdoes the SATA 6GB/s SSD.
Oddly, I also have a 250GB Samsung EVO 850 in the Thunderbay which I boot Windows 10 off of and it shows the windows logo almost instantly.
Click to expand...

Same SSD for me, a Samsung EVO 850 250GB model, on a Thunderbolt 2 port though. Windows 10 if installed on the same SSD the Windows shows logo and boots up in no time. Very odd. Perhaps a different EFI booter is helpful here!? It doesn't bother me that much now that it's very much the same over and over. If one time macOS Sierra would boot to logo in an instant I would be concerned and outraged :D macOS installed on a 32GB USB3 thumbdrive boots faster to logo than the Thunderbolt drive on my iMac and is quicker to give me login screen than the SSD on Thunderbolt port..
 
allan.nyholm said:
Same SSD for me, a Samsung EVO 850 250GB model, on a Thunderbolt 2 port though. Windows 10 if installed on the same SSD the Windows shows logo and boots up in no time. Very odd. Perhaps a different EFI booter is helpful here!? It doesn't bother me that much now that it's very much the same over and over. If one time macOS Sierra would boot to logo in an instant I would be concerned and outraged :D macOS installed on a 32GB USB3 thumbdrive boots faster to logo than the Thunderbolt drive on my iMac and is quicker to give me login screen than the SSD on Thunderbolt port..
Click to expand...

I'm wondering if it's the SSD. If I benchmark my two SSDs, I don't get the full performance of the drive even with trim enabled and all that stuff.
 
cbrand493 said:
I'm wondering if it's the SSD. If I benchmark my two SSDs, I don't get the full performance of the drive even with trim enabled and all that stuff.
Click to expand...

Was the SSD performing as expected before using 10.13?

Perhaps try running from the terminal "fsck -fy" and see maybe it will force trimming block of the SSD to restore its performance.
 
cbrand493 said:
Made no difference. Just benchmarked it, 370 MB/s read, 320 write.
Click to expand...

You mentioned that you are not getting full bench mark on the SSD. What is the full bench mark performance?

Sounds like maybe APFS could be causing the slow down.
 
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