Mojave secondary internal HDD use Extended Journal or APFS?

[mindquest]

Have an iMac running last version of Mojave with a Samsung SSD for the boot drive formatted with APFS. Going to add a secondary internal Western Digital 2T hard drive to it and wanted to know if I should format it as Extended Journal or APFS?

The article below that I read seems to indicate that I should use Extended journal for the hard drive. If I am copying something from the HD to the SSD (or visa versa) does Mojave do some sort of on the fly conversion of the data to the correct format?

Understanding Apple Partition Types and How to Use Them

Apple supports three different partition schemes: GUID Partition Table, Apple Partition Map, and Master Boot Record. Which one should you use?

www.lifewire.com

 

[beren12]

I use zfs for a few 2ndary or external drives. It works great with os x and linux, and there's even a beta for windows. It's where apfs got most of it's ideas from, but apfs is a poor clone. Full data checksums, snapshots, can send your data to another zfs pool quickly, transparent compression too! http://openzfsonosx.org/

 

[naerct]

Yes, I've read from many places that HFS+ is overall a better file system for spindles. Indeed, since I am running a 5 drive SoftRAID5 inside my cMP, I have no choice. SoftRAID still hasn't figured out how to work with APFS, and promising a version 6 which does that for a couple of years already...
One of my data backups is also in RAID5, but I replaced TM with a WD USB3 8TB external using SuperDuper!'s copy newer to update data. While my understanding of APFS said no, I wanted some of the features of APFS. Being able to share space with all the volumes can save a lot of space and make everything a lot easier. Just add or delete APFS volumes as necessary. APFS makes it work like a SoftRAID, where you can change volume sizes at will, but not automatically like APFS. This is a much better system for managing storage, since most of it is done without having to shrink one partition and add another each time your storage needs change. I do seem to remember seeing 30MB/s on the Blackmagic Speed Test from that WD, but I can't remember whether it was on the USB2 or USB3. Who cares, as most of my backups are done overnight. On a second complete backup, I care more about ease of use than speed. My boot drive gets 2800MB/s when I need the speed for the OS. I recommend APFS for data spindles (as well as SSDs) as the best file system for Macs, despite all the honors for HFS+.

 

[Fishrrman]

If the drive is going to have a bootable copy of the OS on it, make it APFS.
If it's just going to be "for data" (NOT a bootable drive), I'd recommend HFS+ (Mac OS extended with journaling enabled).

I've read reports that APFS on a platter-based hard drive can actually slow down overall performance and "over-fragment" the drive...

 

[LuisN]

Compatibility
Can I use Apple File System with my existing hard disk drive?

Yes. Apple File System is optimized for Flash/SSD storage, but can also be used with traditional hard disk drives (HDD) and external, direct-attached storage.

Frequently Asked Questions

Describes Apple’s next-generation filesystem.

developer.apple.com