I recommend clean installing Sierra if you have problems with your current installation. Just hold off of High Sierra before some bugfix releases come out.
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Is upgrading to High Sierra worth it?
- Thread starter AdamA9
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I recommend clean installing Sierra if you have problems with your current installation. Just hold off of High Sierra before some bugfix releases come out.
for me, the most important updates happen 'under the hood'. so, perhaps nothing important to perceive, but good to know you might be experiencing better stability, a cleaner os, etc...
What? File copies on the same drive on APFS are near instantaneous. I can copy a 5 GB disk image in a couple of seconds. Furthermore, when you copy that file, the disk usage doesn't change.
ie.
Let's say you have 100 GB left on your APFS drive. You have a 5 GB disk image in directory A, but you want to copy it to directory Z on the same drive. You do the copy. 2 seconds later the copy is complete, and you still have 100 GB left on the drive.
On HFS+, it might take one or two dozen seconds or whatever, and you would have 95 GB left after the copy.
Why? Cuz on APFS, the raw data isn't actually duplicated. The way the file system works here is fundamentally different.
Having inside my MP 2013 a SSD, which unavoidably will get the new file system and, if I understood right
, in such cases booting from a HFS+ external USB clone will not work I ask myself how to upgrade and still remain on the safe side...Until now I could always -if in trouble- boot from an external clone
and clone it back to the inner main drive after wiping it.Is this still possible???
Yes. I recently wanted to check something out in Sierra, so I booted my CCC clone. When I was done, I booted my MBA back to High Sierra.Having inside my MP 2013 a SSD, which unavoidably will get the new file system and, if I understood right
Until now I could always -if in trouble- boot from an external clone
Is this still possible???
The challenge in recovering using the clone is that you may need to totally reformat the internal drive back to HFS+ before you can clone back.
DS
Thank you very much for your info.
However as far as I know High Sierra installs specific firmware and drivers fitting the mac model one upgrades. So probably recovering a previous OS from an external drive might be a risky task, besides what you mention about reformatting the internal drive to HFS+
FWIW it has been worth it for me for 2 reasons. 1) I am finding it MORE stable than Sierra in terms of sleep/wake behaviour (I used to get semi regular kernel panics or simply a failure to wake in clamshell mode - no such problem so far with HS). 2) GUI is visibly smoother on my 4k monitor, especially mission control which used to lag like hell if I had lots of windows open. File operations within finder are perceptibly nippier too (though only just, for my use cases). HS makes my 15" TB MBP perform in the way I'd always expected it to (I was shocked at how laggy Mission Control was on an almost top spec MBP!).
I went through 3 850 EVO's and no go on any of them but they were probably not any anyway.
While High Sierra runs fine with 4 GB, with continued usage I find 4 GB RAM limiting these days. It feels less constrained with 8 GB even with relatively light usage. The reason I say this is that I had an 8 GB 2009 and a 4 GB 2008 running side by side with High Sierra, and the 4 GB would just bog down from time to time even just doing email, surfing, and Word. I wasn't planning on upgrading the 4 GB machine, because its mainly just a kitchen recipe and surfing machine, but after using it a while beside the other one, I eventually decided to upgrade it to 8 GB. Overall it's just a smoother experience with 8 GB. The fact that Amazon had a big flash sale on memory helped with that decision though. It cost me under US$40 to upgrade to 8 GB, so it was a no-brainer.
OTOH, going to 16 GB doesn't seem to make any difference with that kind of usage.
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For what it's worth, I did a clean install to High Sierra about two weeks ago and it's been running fine for me, not a single problem.
But... enough other folks here are reporting problems that, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably wait a couple weeks and see where things stand at that time.
But... enough other folks here are reporting problems that, if I had to do it all over again, I would probably wait a couple weeks and see where things stand at that time.
EugW wrote:
"While High Sierra runs fine with 4 GB, with continued usage I find 4 GB RAM limiting these days. It feels less constrained with 8 GB even with relatively light usage."
I wouldn't expect good performance of any recent release of the Mac OS on a Mac with less than 8gb of RAM. This doesn't mean the computer won't boot and run -- I said "good" performance...
I'm wondering how much longer before 16gb becomes "the minimum"...?
"While High Sierra runs fine with 4 GB, with continued usage I find 4 GB RAM limiting these days. It feels less constrained with 8 GB even with relatively light usage."
I wouldn't expect good performance of any recent release of the Mac OS on a Mac with less than 8gb of RAM. This doesn't mean the computer won't boot and run -- I said "good" performance...
I'm wondering how much longer before 16gb becomes "the minimum"...?