Converting to APFS?

[Trusteft]

I have a late 2012 mac mini. Fresh installation of High Sierra and updated to latest version/patches last night. (non beta).
I have the usual Apple programs installed, including FCPX. Everything sort of works fine (having some issues with FC but that's for another thread).
When I installed High Sierra I missed (or wasn't there, no idea) the APFS conversion option.
Is it a non destructive thing to do, 100%?
I assume I can do it from booting into the disk utilities and doing it from there.

 

[Bart Kela]

The Mac mini (late 2012) has rotational hard drives and the High Sierra installation process does not convert these volumes to APFS. Only flash drives are upgraded to APFS during this installation process.

I know one can convert an auxiliary rotational drive from HFS+ to APFS after the fact. I do not know about converting an HFS+ formatted High Sierra boot hard drive, but it's worth firing up Disk Utility to see if the option is available.

You might consider waiting until Apple endorses the conversion of HFS+ formatted rotational drives to APFS.

 

[Trusteft]

The Mac mini (late 2012) has rotational hard drives and the High Sierra installation process does not convert these volumes to APFS. Only flash drives are upgraded to APFS during this installation process.

I know one can convert an auxiliary rotational drive from HFS+ to APFS after the fact. I do not know about converting an HFS+ formatted High Sierra boot hard drive, but it's worth firing up Disk Utility to see if the option is available.

You might consider waiting until Apple endorses the conversion of HFS+ formatted rotational drives to APFS.

I am pretty sure I installed 2 SSDs

 

[LarryJoe33]

I am pretty sure I installed 2 SSDs

Then go for it.

 

[h9826790]

Don't worry if you miss that.

IMO, at this stage, APFS bring more trouble than benefit if compare to HFS+.

 

[Bart Kela]

I am pretty sure I installed 2 SSDs

A detail you neglected to include in your original post.

Go for it if you feel like it.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Apfs is nice. ...as long as you don't run boot camp. ...bc once you do a conversion, and realize you can't get a workable boot camp partition on it, reinstalling to get a clean HFS volume back under HS, which is possible in terminal, still leaves you with an incorrect GPT partition error that's the beginning of a time consuming headache of workarounds on top of workarounds, which may or may not yield anything useful.

Guess what I spent the last 7 hours on...

 

[h9826790]

Apfs is nice. ...as long as you don't run boot camp. ...bc once you do a conversion, and realize you can't get a workable boot camp partition on it, reinstalling to get a clean HFS volume back under HS, which is possible in terminal, still leaves you with an incorrect GPT partition error that's the beginning of a time consuming headache of workarounds on top of workarounds, which may or may not yield anything useful.

Guess what I spent the last 7 hours on...

IMO, it’s more than bootcamp. Relatively unable performance, slows boot, finder hang, unable to recovery if anything goes wrong, etc.

But it really more efficient, in term of space management. e.g. files cloning. But that’s not what a general user need.

I am with the APFS, I am OK for that at this moment. No real need to go back to HFS+. I simply use BootChamp to solve the “boot back to MacOS” issue. (I keep all SIP and gatekeeper OFF to make my life easier, because I have to run some 3rd party driver and software. So, BootChamp really work like a champ for me.

However, if there is an option not to convert to APFS, I will stay at HFS+. I see virtually no benefit to use that at this moment. But the unpredictable boot time is a bit annoying indeed.

 

[Trusteft]

I don't care about bootcamp. I won't install windows on this.
Still, seeing how there might still be issues in general with APFS, I think I will wait a month or two to see how it goes.
Thank you all for your input.

 

[DeltaMac]

If you upgraded to High Sierra, and you have an SSD for your boot drive - that should have automatically reformatted to an APFS volume.
Check in your Disk Utility to see if that is what you have now.
At the moment, installing High Sierra does not give you an option for APFS. It either changes your drive, or not.
SSD will be changed (usually), a spinning hard drive will not. The Option existed with early betas of High Sierra, and was dropped in the final release.
The reason that I say an SSD is usually changed: I have an SSD in external case, which has multiple partitions, all various OS X bootable systems. When I installed High Sierra on one of the partitions, the format for that bootable partition remains as the other bootable partitions on that same drive --- Mac OS extended.
Your boot SSD, with no other bootable system other than a recovery system, should be APFS now.

 

[decafjava]

If you upgraded to High Sierra, and you have an SSD for your boot drive - that should have automatically reformatted to an APFS volume.
Check in your Disk Utility to see if that is what you have now.
At the moment, installing High Sierra does not give you an option for APFS. It either changes your drive, or not.
SSD will be changed (usually), a spinning hard drive will not. The Option existed with early betas of High Sierra, and was dropped in the final release.
The reason that I say an SSD is usually changed: I have an SSD in external case, which has multiple partitions, all various OS X bootable systems. When I installed High Sierra on one of the partitions, the format for that bootable partition remains as the other bootable partitions on that same drive --- Mac OS extended.
Your boot SSD, with no other bootable system other than a recovery system, should be APFS now.

Interesting, I have a fusion drive, I suppose that is unchanged from HFS as the drive is seen as a single volume correct?

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

Interesting, I have a fusion drive, I suppose that is unchanged from HFS as the drive is seen as a single volume correct?

Yes.
Personally, I won't switch to APFS on SSD either at this moment. Too many users complain about slow boot times and slow writing speeds. Apple should fix that first.