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New Apple File System Coming in macOS High Sierra Won't Work With Fusion Drives
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sweet. thank you.
oh right, my phone has APFS right now and my computers don't..
and the (applicable) files work properly between the phone and computers.. so should be similar between a computer running APFS and one on HFS.. that's a calming thought
thanks again.
Yeah right.... I'll believe that when I see it.
So long as conventional drives continue to outpace in terms of storage capability (8TB+ and rising) and price (for next to nothing <$200 for 8TB!), there will be a place and a NEED for conventional rotational drives on Macs. All media servers that aren't owned by rich people will need conventional drives for storage. I've got over 10TB here for my whole house media server run on a Mac Mini Server Quad-I7 and there's simply no way I could do that with a SSD.
Frankly, I think this new file system is very poorly designed in that it cannot simply automatically adapt for the type of drive you're using with it. There should be no need to have more than ONE type of file system in the future. Having separate systems for solid state and rotational is STUPID. Like only APPLE since Steve Jobs died STUPID. Like only a moron like Jony Ive would think of something that stupid. Don't license ZFS. Create a new file system that only works with one type of drive and make it the new standard....BRILLIANT Apple! Just Brilliant!
There should be One OS & One File System. Apple fracked it all up again.
Let's continue to have iOS and macOS and tvOS and toiletOS and have them all not work together properly or independently (5th Gen AppleTV STILL dependent on you having iTunes running on a Mac or PC somewhere in the house for local content???? WTF is wrong with Apple???)
It is a bit odd that a filesystem actually cares of the disk type and refuses to work unless it's an ssd. Having said that, though, I guess it will be even more weird (from a marketing PoV) to see apple still launching spinning/fusion drive equipped macs, and automatically deny all the advertised features of this filesystem to the potential buyers.
On a second thought, though, I wouldn't be too surprised if that indeed happened, to be honest.
Interesting to see how this will play out on the upcoming Mac Pro.
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I don't see why not. As long as you have a filesystem that the OS kernel can recognize, that's all that matters.
Interesting thread. None of the betas asked me to convert (Mac mini with pure spinning drive). I did it on my own in the recovery mode. I actually think it's slower with APFS than HFS+. I may spend some time putting it back to HFS+.
This has nothing to do with SSD vs. HDD - APFS works fine on either, though the most benefits are found on SSDs. The issue is specifically with Fusion drives, and fusion drives work very differently than a regular SSD or HDD. Specifically, a fusion drive uses Apple's Core Storage API to marry two physical drives (an SSD and an HDD) into one - and then Core Storage automatically manages which files live on the SSD and which on the HDD with no use intervention. The stumbling block is that APFS doesn't use, nor does it need to use, core storage.
Whereas core storage is an API Apple created independent of HFS+ that they essentially tacked onto the file system (honestly, the fact that Apple has been able to do some of the things they have done on a file system level with a file system as antiquated as HFS+ is nothing short of miraculous), APFS has a built-in system called volume pools - a similar concept to core storage, but a drastically different implementation.
So what we are running into is a difficulty in converting a core storage volume into an APFS volume pool. From the testing I've done during the beta, I didn't run into any obvious issues with an APFS formatted fusion drive. With that being said, Apple was/is obviously concerned enough about data integrity (which they absolutely should be) that they wanted to hold off on upgrading fusion drives to APFS. If there is even a small bug in the file system, catastrophic problem (i.e. data loss) can occur. My guess is Apple wants to get High Sierra on as many computers as possible, and have as many as possible upgrade to APFS and collect telemetry data on these various systems before moving forward with fusion and APFS. Even with as much in-house testing that is done at Apple, as well as the 10's of thousands of beta testers out there, there are so many different possible system configurations it is impossible to test them all. So Apple is playing it as better safe than sorry - which is absolutely the right thing to do.
Now, if months down the line after a .1 and .2 update, we still can't upgrade our Fusion drives to APFS, then there is cause for concern.
Exactly. High Sierra will work on Macs that Sierra does work for. They did NOT say APFS will work across the board. In fact, they specifically said it was SSD aware and better suited for SSDs. I watched the keynote several times. I was surprised that it even worked on Fusion drives.
This has nothing to do with whether Apple will still sell Macs with Fusion Drive. High Sierra works perfectly well on Macs with Fusion Drives formatted for HFS+ - I’m running one right now.
There is no reason for Apple to remove/replace Fusion Drives, as Fusion Drives will work just as well on September 25 as they did on September 24. This is not some sort of “Y2K bug.”
This is a software issue, not hardware. Once APFS is debugged for Fusion Drives, Fusion Drives will be converted from HFS+ to APFS, and life will go on. Until then, those same HFS+ Fusion Drives will keep spinning happily along.
If you went to Apple insisting that you deserve some sort of hardware fix (free SSD???) for this issue, they (ought to) treat you respectfully, however, you’ll have a very, very, very hard time making the case that you have a problem in need of repair. There’s no harm, other than not being able to immediately get APFS on your Fusion Drive.
That actually could be the case - that APFS is slower than HFS+ on a spinning HDD. With the additional features that APFS provides, that requires additional overhead, which would not be noticeable on a SSD, but could be noticeable on a HDD. Specifically, APFS checksums file metadata (though not the entire file...which is an entirely other discussion) - checksums require disk access, and increase disk access can have negative impacts on performance with a HDD.
I guess people think HFS+ is now some form of malware and is ABSOLUTELY HORRIBLE. High Sierra will install on any Mac that Sierra is able to install on. You just might not get APFS.
People really do not understand how fusion drives work and they are just complaining. A fusion drive is not just some unit like a HDD or SSD that you can just pick up. It uses an API and has some overhead to combine an SSD and a HDD together. This is the issue with APFS failing. Not because it cares what kind of drive you use, but Fusion drives are a special kind of technology that HDDs and SSDs do not need to worry about.
You’ve lost it. It was about the OS. And the fact that the entire OS is based on APFS. But whatever. Clearly you just want to argue for the sake of arguing. Guess different things are trivial features to some. I suppose you’re happy you get new emojis. Adios.
Maybe, but it may also be due to the people who just can’t wrap their heads around the Fusion concept. Anything that may potentially kill their favorite boogie man is probably alright by them. In their minds, Fusion is malware, and must be exterminated asap.
It’s a form of magical thinking; If Apple eliminates Fusion, then the price of 1 TB-Flash-equipped iMacs will magically drop overnight to the same price as today’s 1 TB Fusion-equipped iMacs.
High Sierra does install on those machines. What on earth are you going on about?
*ROFL*
The entire OS is based on APFS?!?!
And you're accusing me of not having watched the keynote closely?!
The OS is not “based on APFS.” APFS is not a coding language, it’s a sub-system for managing physical storage - what block of data is stored where on the SSD or HDD, the rules under which that data is witten and read to/from that storage, etc. The High Sierra operating system runs on both HFS+ and APFS (I’ve done it on both).
HFS+ was designed to work with spinning HDDs, with their sectors, head seek times, etc. APFS was written to get the most out of SSDs, which address and store data in a very different way. The principle benefits of APFS will go to people with SSDs, because for the first time, there’s an Apple file system designed with SSDs in mind.
Yes, Apple wants to move as many users as possible to APFS as soon as possible. Since the vast majority of Apple’s product line uses Flash storage, and Flash is expensive, improving the reliability and efficiency of that storage (more stuff packed into the same space) means there will be more happy customers (and likely, less pressure to provide more and more Flash storage every year at reduced prices). This is little different than automakers building fuel-efficient vehicles when the price of fuel goes up. Since the price of Flash has not been spiraling downward as people may wish, “fuel efficiency” is a pretty good selling point.
I am on the opposite end, wondering if one can choose to stay on HFS+ even with pure internal SSD when upgrading to High Sierra. I don't trust a new OS as much as I don't trust a new FS, but at least with High Sierra there are features that I would like to try and test such as eGPU. With APFS the benefits is only about efficiency as far as I can tell.
Gonna be a bunch of upset people because Apple says they can upgrade, then destroy their disk, and make them recover it.
Wrong on both counts. HDDs are not converted and the option to do that from Recovery is also not there. The one beta that allowed me to convert from Recovery left me with an unbootable drive. Only data HDDs can be converted, not system drives.
I'm not an expert on the subject by any means so I'm only going to pose a few questions.
If it can't work on fusion drives in the final release why was it working on the beta? Was there a major issue with the Fusion drives running the new file system during testing that was causing issues?
To me it sounds like people are upset because it sounds like it was simply cut off as a feature to planes obsolescence a large number of Macs.
If there was an issue that's one thing but why is what I think the fusion drive owners would like to know.
Very interesting question... From the linked support article, I can't make that up. It simply distinguishes between "all-flash built-in storage" and Fusion drives. I could argue it both ways; maybe they found a problem with Fusion setups. Or maybe Fusion drives are OK but there is currently suboptimal performance on spinning disks. Since harddrives are also exempt from the update, I'm guessing it's the latter.
This support document says that harddrives also aren't converted:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT208018
And yet it wasn't ready for release and they released it anyway?
Your post contributes nothing but an implied insult. This is called flame baiting. Your post has been reported.
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It's good to hear it will at least function on a rotating drive (not clear at all in the article), but you're telling me they didn't test this thing on their own shipping fusion drives before releasing it? Clearly, it wasn't ready for prime time. What else is missing/wrong? Apple is now using regular users as guinea pigs?
There's a reason why Microsoft is selling Surface PCs very well these days and Apple is having trouble selling ANYONE an iPad Pro. They also refuse to admit that touchscreen OPTIONS would be a good idea (if only to spite Microsoft). It was a good idea to allow Windows to be installed on Macs. This increased their audience and people who need both. But they are now limiting that audience by not including touchscreens on Macbooks.
Even if they aren't used in macOS, they should include the capability for Windows users and frankly they should allow iOS emulation inside macOS for obvious reasons (not the least of which is to be able to play iOS only games on a Mac which was gaining new games until Apple ditched OpenGL (before finishing it to the last update) for Metal that almost no one uses or supports on the Mac the last time I looked. They took the cross-platform coding advantage (OpenGL) that made some game development for the Mac fairly easy and instead of waiting for the new cross-platform STANDARD to be finished (Vulkan), they jump in with a non-standard solution of their own that does little more than DRIVE AWAY game makers who can't be bothered to make special code for 5-8% of the market.
You do realize that Windows 10 on a phone is NOT the same install as that on a home computer, right? You install what's needed for a given platform, but that doesn't mean you create a new OS either. iOS started out as a subset of OS X. But now it's macOS (formerly OS X) getting most of its new "features" from iOS because Apple doesn't give a crap about "trucks" anymore (as the utter lack of updates to most of their line has shown including STILL no new Mac Mini model superior to the 2012 server).
I didn't ignore anything. You started making assumptions based on two words. iOS and macOS should have re-converged by now on a core level and macOS should have basic touch screen options instead of a flipping stupid function key "pad" that takes all the power of an iOS device but can't do anything useful like one all just to avoid admitting they were WRONG. Small thin lightweight notebooks make excellent pads in a pinch (something Microsoft did right for once).
Instead, Apple refuses to admit their phone is actually a computer and their computers are pretty much left out for the garage sales these days. Oh, we have a replacement for R2D2 coming...some day. It's gonna be GREAT though! We can put out a new phone every 8 months, but we can't manage a new Mac Mini or Mac Pro for 3-4 years at a stretch when any two-bit PC maker worth 1/20,000 of Apple can offer 20 different NEW Windows/Linux machines every 4 months. It's ridiculous. They can afford multi-billion dollar real estate in the shape of UFOs, but can't manage to update their hardware in a reasonable time period!
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No - it's not. Read the thread, read the article. Your machine will still be able to upgrade to High Sierra - just without APFS
That's really sad because I truly believe the operating system formerly known as OS X got ONE HELL of a lot SLOWER just between Mavericks and El Capitan for rotating hard drives. I got my mother a 13" Macbook Pro back in 2012 that I thought she'd understand better than the Windows machine my brother got her (she did in that sense) and as soon as I updated it to El Capitan, the machine started slowing down big time. If I look at Activity Monitor, it shows very little CPU time being used when it slows down (the thing you'd normally expect as a computer ages), but rather it's going slow as molasses because of the hard drive activity, like it's trying to load everything concurrently (something SSDs do very well since they handle random access data with total aplomb) whereas it seemed to "time share" activity MUCH BETTER in older versions of the OS.
Her computer becomes damn near unusable at times and reboots and even just switching users take FOREVER. My own Mac Mini server from the same years is nowhere near as bad, but then it has RAID 0 drives and twice the memory (and CPUS for that matter at faster speed). I don't expect her machine to act like it did in 2012, but the amount of slowdown she gets is absolutely unacceptable and appears to be due to the OS and I mean when the machine was only three years old. I find it almost absurd she needs a new computer just to read email, Facebook and look some things up on the web once in awhile, but the slowdown is driving her crazy and she doesn't even expect much from it.
That’s...kind of what betas are actually for, my friend. Sometimes features in beta don’t ship for the final release because they aren’t ready but aren’t worth delaying the release by weeks to months. Again: Filesystems are HARD.
Good luck finding a company that hasn’t done something a lot like this at some point.
Nice. We literally bought an iMac 27 4.2 GHz 16 GB Ram and 2 TB Fusion Drive just last week and the Apple Store employee said we wouldn't need th 3TB drive since High Sierra would be much more efficient with data compression.