Craig Federighi Says Apple Intends to Address APFS Support for Fusion Drives 'Very Soon'

[MacRumors]

Apple is planning to share news on APFS support for Fusion Drives "very soon," Apple software engineering chief Craig Federighi told MacRumors reader Jonathan in an email this afternoon.

Federighi shared the detail after Jonathan sent him an email asking whether or not APFS was still in the works for Fusion Drives, which combine a hard drive with flash storage to provide the speed of an SSD with the affordability of a standard hard drive. Fusion Drives are used in iMacs and Mac mini machines.

In response to Jonathan's question, Federighi gave a short but enticing answer, which we verified:

Hi Jonathan,

We intend to address this question very soon...

Thanks,

- craig

With the launch of macOS High Sierra, Apple introduced a new Apple File System for Macs that have all-flash built-in storage. At the time macOS High Sierra was introduced, Apple said that the initial release of the software would not allow Fusion Drives to be converted to APFS, but confirmed APFS support would be coming at a later date.

Since then, iMac and Mac mini owners who have Fusion Drives have been eagerly waiting for Apple to implement support for the feature, but in update after update, no APFS support for Fusion Drives has materialized.

Federighi's statement suggests that APFS will be added as a feature in an upcoming software update, perhaps the macOS 10.14 update that's expected to be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June.

For those unfamiliar with the new Apple File System, it's a more modern file system than HFS+ and has been optimized for solid state drives. It is safe and secure, offering crash protection, safe document saves, stable snapshots, simplified backups, strong native encryption, and more.

Article Link: Craig Federighi Says Apple Intends to Address APFS Support for Fusion Drives 'Very Soon'

 

[jonblatho]

For my fellow Fusion Drive users...you’re welcome!

 

[Sciomar]

Here's hoping very soon is this year!

 

[RogerWilco]

Are you reelin' in the years,
Stowin' away the time?

Craig, after a while, nobody cares.

 

[dmrowley]

I'm not going to be beta testing that function.... Scares me to think of the risks. I still have about 3 months left for my initial BackBlaze backup to complete at 1.5MBps...

 

[jonblatho]

I'm not going to be beta testing that function.... Scares me to think of the risks. I still have about 3 months left for my initial BackBlaze backup to complete at 1.5MBps...

I beta tested it during the macOS High Sierra betas. It worked pretty smoothly but every now and again something strange happened where you could tell it wasn’t quite ready on Fusion Drives…but nothing actually bad ever happened (i.e., no data loss). The most painful part was reverting from APFS to HFS+, which required me to back up to external media, format the drive, and reinstall macOS from the backup. (Even then, it wasn’t too bad.)

I’ll also note that the reason I was comfortable beta testing a file system upgrade was that mostly everything important on my computer is on the cloud anyway, through GitHub or iCloud.

 

[Swampthing]

So much for people who pretend to be asking a personal question just to get an answer they can immediately blast worldwide to mac news websites...

 

[jonblatho]

So much for people who pretend to be asking a personal question just to get an answer they can immediately blast worldwide to mac news websites...

Better to have an update than radio silence, which is why I shared. (Also, it wasn’t immediate. This exchange happened several hours ago.)

 

[Junipr]

It's 2018, and Apple plans on supporting their own HDD-based Fusion Drive technology from 2012... "very soon."

This, my friends, is what happens when emojis are numero uno on Apple's priorities list.

 

[Swampthing]

Better to have an update than radio silence, which is why I shared. (Also, it wasn’t immediate. This exchange happened several hours ago.)

So you always intended to report the answer? Was it really a personal question?

I’m not passing judgment one way or the other, but just curious because I think we are less likely to continue to see personal replies when Apple suspects the answers are only intended to be shouted to the High Heavens.

 

[SSDGUY]

P.S. First we gotta finish a new round of emojis.

 

[whizstachio]

Are fusion drives still a thing?

 

[chucker23n1]

It's 2018, and Apple plans on supporting their own HDD-based Fusion Drive technology from 2012... "very soon."

This, my friends, is what happens when emojis are numero uno on Apple's priorities list.

No, it’s what happens when they’d rather wait another few months and leave Fusion Drive users on a perfectly fine file system for now, work the kinks out, and finally migrate them.

Before APFS was announced, virtually nobody except Siracusa even mentioned problems with HFS+. Now that APFS is a thing, suddenly Apple is terrible if they migrate people conservatively and safely?

 

[69650]

So much for people who pretend to be asking a personal question just to get an answer they can immediately blast worldwide to mac news websites...

Federighi is not that naive, he knew his comment would be circulated.

 

[oneMadRssn]

This, my friends, is what happens when emojis are numero uno on Apple's priorities list.

Apple has nothing to do with Emojis. Emojis are controlled by Unicode Consortium, which is a non-profit that maintains the Unicode standard to ensure there is a standard character encoding across systems. They've been doing this since the early 90s. Apple is probably a member, but hardly in charge.

When Unicode adds a new character, be it a written character of a language or an emoji, all tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter, Samsung, LG, Lenovo, HTC, etc. should release patches to their software to support the updates. Otherwise the risk is their customers will receive as an email or text, or see on a website or app, an unsupported character.

Personally I'm glad Apple updates their software to support the latest Unicode standard whenever possible, just like I hope they update to support other well-recognized software standards whenever possible.

 

[TVreporter]

Can he address why High Sierra has bricked so many Macs and nothing works to restore it?

 

[gnomeisland]

I'm not going to be beta testing that function.... Scares me to think of the risks. I still have about 3 months left for my initial BackBlaze backup to complete at 1.5MBps...

Test that back blaze backup BEFORE you need it. I spent ~3 months on my initial backup and the whole thing went FUBAR on their end. Their response was, "well, try again." I left.

 

[SSDGUY]

No, it’s what happens when they’d rather wait another few months and leave Fusion Drive users on a perfectly fine file system for now, work the kinks out, and finally migrate them.

Before APFS was announced, virtually nobody except Siracusa even mentioned problems with HFS+. Now that APFS is a thing, suddenly Apple is terrible if they migrate people conservatively and safely?

Been almost a year working the kinks out. Must be a lotta kinks.

 

[jonblatho]

It's 2018, and Apple plans on supporting their own HDD-based Fusion Drive technology from 2012... "very soon."

This, my friends, is what happens when emojis are numero uno on Apple's priorities list.

Macs with Fusion Drives are still very much supported. macOS High Sierra installs and runs just fine on HFS+. Though I was completely comfortable beta testing APFS on my Mac with a Fusion Drive, I’m glad it wasn’t deployed to all such Macs when High Sierra was released this fall. It wasn’t ready and though I ran into no serious problems, it could certainly have been much worse. File systems are hard which is probably why Apple put this move off for a decade-plus.

Also, I think you greatly overestimate the effort required on software engineers’ part to add emoji. (No, software engineers don’t design new emoji.)

 

[TheTurboGinger]

It would be nice if they got APFS working with RAID too!

 

[jonblatho]

Been almost a year working the kinks out. Must be a lotta kinks.

It’s almost like file systems are difficult to develop or something.

 

[dogslobber]

If they wait long enough then the problem will go away. I think that's what he means.

 

[gnomeisland]

APFS, AirPlay 2, HomePod stereo, iMessages in iCloud, etc. Apple needs to find a way to either better utilize their engineering talent or bring on more talent quickly. Otherwise this WWDC is just going to be announcements of features announced last year and maybe released this year.

 

[Anony-mouse]

I have a 2017 iMac with 1 TB Fusion Drive, and the most recent 10.13.4 and security patches has resulted in long delays in application launches, especially MS Office apps. I think it has to do with the Meltdown and Spectre mitigation patches.

I really hope that the coming Fusion Drive support in AFPS will improve fusion drive performance. Currently my iMac is feeling really slow despite it being a recent model.

PS: SSD-based Macs (e.g. MacBook Air) works well even with the latest patches.

 

[jonblatho]

So you always intended to report the answer? Was it really a personal question?

I’m not passing judgment one way or the other, but just curious because I think we are less likely to continue to see personal replies when Apple suspects the answers are only intended to be shouted to the High Heavens.

No, as I said I sat on this for several hours. I made no indication that it was a personal question (in fact, I didn’t even mention that my own Mac has a Fusion Drive, just that I was asking out of curiosity).

Federighi’s definitely not a moron, despite what seems to be the prevailing opinion on this forum. He’s had his emails shared here before, even about this very topic as linked in the article. He wouldn’t say anything he didn’t intend to go public.