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High Sierra did NOT convert drive to APFS - how to do that?

Milltek

Milltek

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 26, 2011
169
15
U.S. Northeast
Hi,

I installed High Sierra on a 2012 Mac Mini this morning and it did not convert the spinning HDD to APFS. Did a few searches and found that if you restart with Command + R and select Disk Utility the Edit sub-menu offers the chance to convert. Unfortunately in my case that option is greyed out and (obviously) can't be selected. Anyone have any ideas what to do to convert the HDD?
 
BasicGreatGuy said:
If I am not mistaken, HDD to APFS for the internal drive conversion is not supported (at this time).
Click to expand...

I know that the Fusion drive does not convert but I converted an extra internal HDD to APFS on my iMac. (It doesn’t have a system on it. Just data. Can you remember where you saw that?
 
Milltek said:
I know that the Fusion drive does not convert but I converted an extra internal HDD to APFS on my iMac. (It doesn’t have a system on it. Just data. Can you remember where you saw that?
Click to expand...
"When you install macOS High Sierra on the Mac volume of a solid-state drive (SSD) or other all-flash storage device, that volume is automatically converted to APFS. Fusion Drives, traditional hard disk drives (HDDs), and non-Mac volumes aren't converted. You can't opt out of the transition to APFS."

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018
 
There is no way to convert an internal HDD to APFS at this time but you can clean install to an internal APFS HDD using the recovery console.

Obviously, you will lose all data on the drive but you will end up with an APFS internal HDD.

From Disk Utility, click on Erase and then choose APFS as the format.

That worked just fine for me when I created a Parallels VM of High Sierra the other day for testing purposes.
 
Last edited:
I jump on new macOS versions almost on release day. But not High Sierra. I anticipated tons of APFS bugs to be uncovered by real world use.

Maybe in a few months I'll upgrade.

@SaSaSushi I understand the need for console if you want to convert the boot-drive. But does High Sierra's Disk Utility in the main macOS (not Recovery Console) support APFS formatting of non-bootdrive HDDs? That would be a good sign that Apple thinks the filesystem should be used by disk drives too.
 
SteveJobzniak said:
I jump on new macOS versions almost on release day. But not High Sierra. I anticipated tons of APFS bugs to be uncovered by real world use.

Maybe in a few months I'll upgrade.

@SaSaSushi I understand the need for console if you want to convert the boot-drive. But does High Sierra's Disk Utility in the main macOS (not Recovery Console) support APFS formatting of non-bootdrive HDDs? That would be a good sign that Apple thinks the filesystem should be used by disk drives too.
Click to expand...
You can convert non-boot external drive HDD to APFS with the High Sierra Disk Utility. I did it for one of my external drives, so that my Carbon Copy Cloner backup would be APFS as well, seeing how CCC can now create a bootable APFS drive for High Sierra.
 
My external SSD boot drive did not get converted to APFS when installing High Sierra. It was a clean install. Is it because it's an external drive?
 

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FWIW I have three internal SATA drives on my computer that were all converted to APFS and all working well. These are non system drives storing general data.
 
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