Don't think so.. Apple wants APFS to make use of the performance which you would only get with SSD/Fusion part on iMac's.
It's the reason why you can't convert Mac mini because they don't use SSD's (yet)
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Craig Federighi Says Apple Intends to Address APFS Support for Fusion Drives 'Very Soon'
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Don't think so.. Apple wants APFS to make use of the performance which you would only get with SSD/Fusion part on iMac's.
It's the reason why you can't convert Mac mini because they don't use SSD's (yet)
I wonder, when Apple is going to stop using fusion drive?
2018 and still using 2.5 inch with 5200rpm hard drives on the iMac.
Stop using this kind of hard drive and start using just SSD like the laptops family... someday.
2018 and still using 2.5 inch with 5200rpm hard drives on the iMac.
Stop using this kind of hard drive and start using just SSD like the laptops family... someday.
Too true. Apple’s development time tables have significantly exceeded their announcement time tables. Here we are almost a year after the reveal of a new version of iOS and we’re still waiting on features to launch. I wonder which features announced at WWDC in a few weeks we’ll still be waiting on a year from now. Apple really needs to take a catchup year and announce fewer major features so that we can stop being disappointed when features we’re anticipating actually aren’t even close to completion.
Hi Jonathan,
We intend to address this question very soon...
Thanks,
- craig
Maybe the answer will be to install the next macOS version or even better buy a new iMac with SSD.
We intend to address this question very soon...
Thanks,
- craig
Maybe the answer will be to install the next macOS version or even better buy a new iMac with SSD.
Please! I made the mistake of upgrading my iMac's FusionDrive to APFS and I've been living with a buggy iMac since — mostly running out of space when I have hundreds of GBs available.
I could have just gone and formatted my Mac but I don't have time for that. I'm just waiting on a macOS upgrade that fixes the bugs and officially supports APFS.
I could have just gone and formatted my Mac but I don't have time for that. I'm just waiting on a macOS upgrade that fixes the bugs and officially supports APFS.
Yes, that would work if you wanted to blow away all the existing data and be left with two drives, with the larger one of them still being HFS+ formatted.
I don't think thats what most people want, but you can do that manually today via recovery mode.
Cost and size. A lot of people want to keep all their home movies and raw pictures on their computer.
A 1TB HDD was cheap. A 1TB SSD cost dramatically more than the rest of the computer.
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It should.
I speculate what has happened is that APFS has been through several internal major versions as they went from testing upgrades in the background on iOS devices, to the first release on iOS (in the middle of the run), to the first new major release of iOS and macOS with APFS. Each new revision has expanded the scope with new requirements and features. This amount of internal churn would also explain why they haven't published the format specification yet.
In particular, I think HDD (and likewise Fusion since it has a HDD component) have been held up because the system was designed for environments with efficient random access. A change to a file does not overwrite the file by default, instead referencing pieces from both the old and new files. These pieces can be all over the drive, meaning a HDD with a moving head has long access times to try to collect all the pieces, and performance takes a hit from SSDs.
Most likely, they had an easy and a hard approach, committed to the easy approach for High Sierra, then realized they needed to go for the hard approach before they were really willing to support it. Random hypothetical - the simpler approach might have been to have a background defragmentation process, but the result of volume snapshotting (such as the local Time Machine backups) made it so that a large constantly changing files (like a VM image) exploded disk usage.
From WWDC vids and a few (non-Apple) comments I've heard, they may also have decided that APFS and CoreStorage should never meet, which means the scheduling for whether data is on the HDD or SSD for Fusion is now a responsibility of APFS.
I'm waiting for a reinstall on my 2012 Mini (with Fusion) until I know I can safely format it APFS.
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If you want to play around on the command-line/do some research, it could be Time Machine local snapshots.
The 1TB Fusion Drives on the newest Macs have only 32GB of flash storage involved. That doesn't by itself explain your drive getting slower, of course. But anybody shopping for a new iMac should consider this below:
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Perfect illustration: I'm happy to wait however long it takes for APFS on Fusion to be rock-solid. We all got along just fine with HFS for decades, so I don't think a little more time is gonna kill anybody.
And emoji characters are just the small portion of every Unicode update.
Apple could have it done in a month if they wanted. No shortage of expertise or resources. They weigh their priorities like any other corporation.
If you configure a high-end 27-inch iMac, you can upgrade the stock 2TB Fusion Drive to 3TB for $100, or you can upgrade it to a 2TB SSD for $1,400. You do not have the option of a 3TB SSD.
50% greater capacity at near SSD performance, for $1,300 less. That is why Fusion Drives are a thing.
[doublepost=1527053197][/doublepost]What is the wallpaper on the iMac in this story? Would love to get it.
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: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'
Here we are 2 weeks shy of a year since they announced AirPlay 2....
I really wish they would slow down, get out of the calendar year cycle and get things less buggy before even announcing them, never mind releasing them. Would it really be that bad to come out with 11.5/10.13.5 this year and 12.0/10.14.0 next year, 12.5/10.14.5 the following...or even 11.5/10.13.5 this fall, 12.0/10.14.0 next spring, or some other longer schedule. Seriously, they either need to do less major features or give it more time.
Because it’s Apple. And $100 becomes $500 when it comes from Apple.
So this way Apple spends $50 on a combined cheap slow spinner and a small SSD and gets “fastish” performance and makes you pay dearly if you want a decent sized full SSD drive.
Honestly, we’ve had spanned volumes (what a fusion drive is) forever.
And there is a reason the industry avoided using them in consumer grade machines. Because it doubles your odds of data loss.
In a spanned volume, if any one of the drives in that spanned volume fails, you lose the data on all of the other drives that are part of that spanned volume.
The more drives you add to a spanned volume, the more you increase your chances of data loss.
It makes no sense in consumer class machines to introduce that risk.
Spanned volumes are intended to be used in RAID configurations. That is where they make sense. Because multiple fast drives working in a striped configuration will simultaneously be retrieving portions of a file and sending it to the CPU at the same time.
With several small drives (say 10 low capacity drives) working in a striped array, none of the drives has to move its heads or search very far for the data, and they all send different chunks back simultaneously causing near instant retrieval.
That striped array is often part of another RAID which mirrors the other spanned volume (striped array).
It can go on and on pulling multiple RAID configurations into other RAID configurations until you have essentially what looks like one large volume made up of hundreds of small drives all working together to deliver chunks of data simultaneously with so many redundancies that if becomes virtually impossible to lose any data due to the checks and balances in the RAID configurations. Depending on the size of your Arrays, you could theoretically have 10 drives fail and not lose one bit of data, and as soon as those drives were replaced, they’d automatically get updated with all the data that used to be on the failed drives.
It makes tons of sense in an enterprise environment to use spanned volumes. But in a home computer, it’s only asking for problems. Not if... but simply when you will lose data.
If you have a “fusion drive” I’d hope that you have a full time automated backup solution running. A fusion drive without a backup is like tempting fate.
Adding APFS to it seems like double-dog daring it.
For my fellow Fusion Drive users...you’re welcome!
Related question: Mac partitions used to be accessible (read only) from bootcamp. Any idea if that's ever coming back?
This was my first thought when I read the response from Federighi.
Expected to see something like this at the top. Sigh.
1. Apple do support their own HDD fusion drive technology because if they didn't it wouldn't work, yet it does.
2. APFS is barely a year old at this point, and was ported to iOS initially then standard MacOS drives only 7 months ago.
I really don't know what you expect, I really don't.
Bring back the downvote button!
How about you stop selling 2018 computers with 2018 price tags and 2008 spinning hard drives, Craig?
Fusion or not, this is embarrassing.
Fusion or not, this is embarrassing.
Yeah, Fusion drives appear to be one of those macrumors trigger things like emojis. Seems like even the most innocent comment about Fusion results in a slew of "I ain't having no spinning rust in my machine" posts
yes
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What's the current price for a 2 TB SSD? That's why one "bothers".
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Bet you don't miss the phone jack, eh? No, for large storage, HDD's are still the price point way to go.
