… that's not true. It's optimized for SSDs, not "only meant" for them. It performs fine on regular HDs.
Fusion drives have an unusual level of complexity, nobody should be surprised that Apple is taking their time to get that right.
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Apple Seeds First Beta of macOS High Sierra 10.13.3 to Developers [Update: Public Beta Available]
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Fusion drives have an unusual level of complexity, nobody should be surprised that Apple is taking their time to get that right.
What exactly is so bad about HFS+ compared to APFS in terms of risks? I've gone down this rabbit hole before and have never found anything other than Torvalds ranting about the case-insensitivity, which nobody really cares about, and APFS is still insensitive by default.
Neither HFS+ nor APFS nor NTFS nor EXT3-4 protect the integrity of the data, which is the real issue. We still have to worry about whether our data is corrupted, or rather praying it doesn't become so since there's no way most of us can detect it anyway. I don't run a RAID system on my laptop and can't keep manually checksumming files, and most people don't even know what that means.
I'm sure APFS is faster and all, but I don't understand the hatred for HFS+ I've been hearing for 10 years when comparing it to contemporary FSs like NTFS and EXT3.
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There is some confusion between "Classic" and was was called "Rosetta." Classic was the OS 9 environment, and that went away with PowerPC machines. Snow Leopard was the first Intel-only OS, but it still had Rosetta for running Carbon PPC apps. I still have a first-gen MPB with Snow Leopard, and I can still get it out if I want to wax nostalgic and run AppleWorks or something (if I want the OS 9 experience, then Sheepshaver is doing fine on HS
)
I disagree with that. High Sierra performs perfectly fine, unless you have a toaster of a machine. Perhaps some old cruft from previous OSes was left over when you upgraded? Or there might always be something else that's causing it, I don't know. But for me, High Sierra performs really well.
There are a number of issues. HFS+ has only one second timestamp granularity, which presents numerous problems with keeping track of file modifications. APFS provides must faster file copying and directory sizing, and allows you to create multiple APFS volumes, without having any waste due to partition boundaries. Also, once APFS on fusion drives is implemented, macOS will be able to make much better use of the faster drive, by flagging certain things such as file metadata as something which should always be stored on the faster medium, which can dramatically improve the performance of numerous operations. Core Storage + HFS+ could not do that. You are correct that APFS doesn't fix some of HFS+'s biggest issues, but it does fix a lot of them, and makes quite a good number of improvements.
I left many of the benefits out, but I think I named enough to prove my point. APFS should be used on hard drives as well, if compatibility with other operating systems is not a concern.
If only it let me losslessly merge containers. During the upgrade to 10.13, it ultimately left me with three containers, each with one volume inside. The only way to merge these appears to be:
- remove the second volume (i.e., lose its data) and container
- expand the first container
- remove the third volume (lose that data, too) and container
- expand the first container
Another benefit of APFS is in performance/latency:
- it has QoS to deprioritize background file system accesses over ones the user notices
- where HFS+ effectively has a global, single-threaded lock due to its monolithic Catalog File structure, APFS should be able to scale much more nicely. Far fewer beachballs!
Yeah, the QoS is what I assume is largely responsible for the almost magical performance improvements most people have seen with APFS upgrades, such as in iOS 10.2. Definitely another reason to use it on hard drives though, because you definitely don't want background I/O bogging down any performance-sensitive I/O on them.
Tried to update from 10.13.2 to 10.13.3 beta on my 2012 iMac I7 27", it failed and gave me a a memory error (4MEM/61/40000000: 0x808c9r90. No matter what, and I tried everything, including reseating the RAM, it would not work. Now doing a reload back to previous revision.
I have yet to see them, FWIW. Maybe 10.13 would be far slower for me without them? I’m not seeing any noticeable performance change.
This is cool if it works well. I'm sick of having my system grind to a halt due to something hogging my disk I/O. I've been putting things on separate drives just to avoid that.
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Interesting observation - I'm using a version of Photoshop at least a generation old (maybe more now - I haven't checked), that hasn't been updated in over a year. I've never had a single issue with it on any of the versions of OS X/macOS.
The only stuff I've really encountered, compatibility-wise, has been with disk utility-type stuff (and that is somewhat understandable since some of the OS updates change file system bits).
Oh - and MS Office had some hiccups moving to High Sierra
I can't help but wonder if there was something that went wrong with your installation vs. it being a problem with the OS itself.
I think it's the external monitor + Nvidia chip with bad Metal drivers. Bad combination in a Mac laptop.