New Apple File System Coming in macOS High Sierra Won't Work With Fusion Drives

[Analog Kid]

I'm a fan of the Fusion Drive-- it's a great compromise between speed and bulk storage without needing to maintain two separate volumes.

Still, I find these kinds of threads completely baffling...

Yikes. Probably should have made that call before beta 1...

That's what makes it beta.

Disorganized roll outs without any clue how to market the products?

This isn't a roll out, it's a beta for testing purposes.

Shame I thought they'd ironed these kinks out during the beta phase - they've had over a year now to get it work with Fusion Drives and hard drives.

Beta testing told them it wasn't ready to roll out, so they dropped support from fusion drives in the first release. This is what betas are for-- to eliminate these kinds of potential problems.

No, I'm saying why release a product now that doesn't support the vast majority of iMac sold in the last 5 years.

High Sierra does support them. APFS only works with specific hardware, but you do realize there will still be a file system even if you have a 10 year old spinning hard drive, right?


Get a grip folks. Nobody ever wants to have to think about their file system. It should just work. If not having APFS on your fusion drive is something you notice, then there's a bigger problem here. If Apple didn't say anything and just converted the APFS fusion drives back to HFS+, I doubt half of you would have even known about this-- and the half that did would have understood the technology well enough to know this isn't a big deal in any way.

This is the problem with public betas: too many people confuse it with "advance copy".

 

[scott911]

Gonna be a bunch of people upset for no reason other than they don't get something others got. They have no idea the benefits this change brings but damned if they'll let that lack of knowledge stop them from complaining!

I was kind of upset when i got my first mac last year, (after thirty years of PC use) - I went with a spinner because of the low cost of entry - figured could easily pop the imac open and put in a flash drive easy of pie. - WRONG!

But the real reason I was upset is that on this beautiful machine, I spend more time looking at a spinning disk access icon than I've had to since the windows 95 days. SLOW doesn't begin to describe it.

So, I was hoping the new apple file system would improve things.

Don't much care what other people get - I Want MY most-expensive-computer-ever-bought to stop making me feel like it's 1995.

fun fact that apple missed 25 bloody years ago.
1992: Seagate is first to market with a 7200-revolutions-per-minute hard drive, the 2.1GB Barracuda.

 

[Analog Kid]

They clearly said ALL iMac in the last 5 years would have the features.

Show me where it specifically says all Macs sold since 2012 would be supported by APFS? Show me where it specifically says support will not be added in a future update? And please stop beating the single sign on for cable horse. Sorry your favorite feature didn't pan out, but you're kind of overplaying the importance of it.

 

[PJivan]

I was kind of upset when i got my first mac last year, (after thirty years of PC use) - I went with a spinner because of the low cost of entry - figured could easily pop the imac open and put in a flash drive easy of pie. - WRONG!

But the real reason I was upset is that on this beautiful machine, I spend more time looking at a spinning disk access icon than I've had to since the windows 95 days. SLOW doesn't begin to describe it.

So, I was hoping the new apple file system would improve things.

Don't much care what other people get - I Want MY most-expensive-computer-ever-bought to stop making me feel like it's 1995.

fun fact that apple missed 25 bloody years ago.
1992: Seagate is first to market with a 7200-revolutions-per-minute hard drive, the 2.1GB Barracuda.

It's delusional, APFS can bring improvement on FusionDrives but it wont trasform your spinning in an SSD, just buy an external SSD if this is your concern and use the internal for backup or archive

 

[djlythium]

Obviously there won't be any more macs with spinning or mixed (fusion) drives, and that's cool. The existing owners, though, might get pissed.

Agreed. I wouldn’t be surprised if all Macs from 2018 onward are solid-state.

 

[emulajavi]

It’ll be great if they’d could enable Bootcamp installations on the SSD part of the Fusion Drive instead of only allowing it on the HDD.

It’d be a welcome addition to Bootcamp users.

 

[J.Gallardo]

The article says perhaps fusion disks will be upgraded... and ssd’s are going apfs, yes or yes.
Why the hurry with apfs?
We know HFS+ works. And how it works.
APFS is not yet well explained, and is not been tested in “real life” for a long time.
As an example:
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2017/09/15/superduper-and-apfs/

 

[PJivan]

It’ll be great if they’d could enable Bootcamp installations on the SSD part of the Fusion Drive instead of only allowing it on the HDD.

It’d be a welcome addition to Bootcamp users.

To be fair it's easy to do while not official yet...like very easy

 

[cerote]

This is why I don't participate in the beta program anymore though. I think I stopped 2 years ago. Public Beta is nice but only possible on computers we don't use to get work done.

Isn't that one of the first rules of betas. Don't run them on machines you need to use. Or on machines you don't mind things not working right. Software companies generally need to update their stuff for compatibility too. And they run their own betas most times to help.

But again never run beta on a machine you need to work 100%.


I only run betas for iOS on my personal phone because I don't mind if something is not working. My work cell I don't even update to updates till a couple weeks after update drops. Or work apps have updates that have compatibility to new os drops before then.

 

[Analog Kid]

Don't much care what other people get - I Want MY most-expensive-computer-ever-bought to stop making me feel like it's 1995.

Buying a computer with a 5400 rpm drive and blaming Apple because software can't make it spin faster is a bit of a dodge... Be accountable for your decisions. Apple didn't tell you the drive was faster than it was. They didn't tell you that you could buy one machine and upgrade it on the cheap. And they didn't promise magical software that could improve your throughput.

https://eshop.macsales.com/shop/ssd/owc/imac
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How long do you expect Apple to support two file systems? This could be a mark of death for all Macs that don't have pure flash storage.

They still support the PowerPC volume format...

 

[mixel]

This is pretty much the only time I’ve been glad the hdd part of my fusion drive is dead.. Mine just works as a 120GB fast ssd, so I use it as a scratch disc and boot from another, bigger external SSD.

 

[rpe33]

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. Apple created the issue when they opened the beta program to the public. While yes, buried in their terms of the beta program, it recommends not using a day to day machine, when Apple chose to open it to non-developers, they need to be a bit more hands on and explain what each beta does, what it means for the user, etc. Most who are on the public beta aren't tech-saavy people, and don't understand what they're getting into. Apple should realize this and make the PBs a bit more consumer-facing, or just eliminate the public beta program. I see far too many complaints on here with beta releases by PB testers that features don't work or their apps don't work.

Do you understand the concept of a beta? If you don't then perhaps you shouldn't be installing it in the first place. Just some friendly advice.

 

[PKFC]

That_escalated_quickly.jpg

I just wanted to point out how their rebuild steps (the command line ones) show a 4TB drive used in Fusion. Even though Apple doesn't offer that config. Not to add more to the conspiracy theories forming in here (I mean their volume as a fusion drive is somehow 280 GB so they know how to test on secondary machines only )

Beta is beta though. I don't know if Google started it, but a prominent example of the weakened usage of Beta was Gmail which was Beta forever. Siri had this type of beta on release. These things (edit: iOS/macOS Public Beta) are actual betas since they are the same as what developers get for testing.

I know I got bit by betas on my mac mini server running 10.9 in RAID 1 with the 10.10 beta. It seemed to update the boot loader and it then couldn't boot to 10.9 anymore. Almost killed my data when I recently deleted my degraded 10.9 RAID set to repair the degraded 10.12 RAID set. (Had two RAID 1 sets each with only one drive to test the upgrade and go back either way). Almost **** a brick, but neither time did I have backups or another machine so that's my bad. Good times though. Probably will buy an external HD for my Airport to time machine from that mac mini.

Long post is long.

 

[jigzaw]

Maybe they need to spend some more time perfecting this before they roll it out. Maybe hold off til next year's OS. Because if they mess this up, it'll be a disaster of how many thousands of people losing/corrupting ALL of their data? No bueno.

I have an all-SSD 2017 iMac so this particular issue doesn't affect me, but it's making me think twice about updating when the new OS comes out because I don't want to be a guinea pig when I use my iMac for my livelihood.

 

[ApfelKuchen]

This is true. I keep forgetting. Once Apple opened the beta program to public beta users, we knew this sort of thing was going to become commonplace. If I had a dollar for every public beta user in the iOS forum who said "why don't my apps work in iOS 11?" I'd be rich rich rich. Do people not realize the betas are primarily for app developers to re-write their apps for the OS? And when they release the betas, it's the first time app developers are getting it too... ugh.

I'm not a developer, but I've been running public betas of various apps and OSes since the mid 1990s. Yes, getting the OS out to developers is a key purpose of running a beta, but it's not the only reason. Exposing software to a wider variety of system configurations (and mis-configurations), and putting it into the hands of people who might use/mis-use that software in unexpected manners produces a more thorough test and cleaner product. IT/support personnel need to evaluate and learn the software before it hits their enduser base, members of the media need to write their support articles, books, and reviews...

But yeah, developers are probably the most valuable testers, producing the most useful fault isolation and high-quality bug reports. They're less likely to ignore the bugs they do find. But if developers alone were sufficient to do the job, why did Apple add the public beta?

 

[Robert.Walter]

Long-time public beta tester here. I enjoy doing this, and filing feedback reports, but...

Really pissed about this.

I don't recall there being any indication that changing over to the APFS would require such a procedure at the end of the beta period. I'm reasonably competent and technical, but I don't SUDO. Tired to even set-up the USB stick to begin the process, and it wanted me to enter a password. Tried all my known (recorded) passwords, and no luck.

I don't mind a bit of instability or flakiness in the process of doing PB testing, but having to revert a file system? That's insane and asks for more technical competence than most P.B. testers are capable of.

This was a very poorly handled aspect of the H.S. P.B. program. Poor communication as to the cost (in terms of time lost learning how to SUDO, and as to whether waiting will solve the problem.)

Apple needs to issue clear guidance for folks like me, the lack of clarity, as to whether to wait for a later H.S. update to incorporate FusionDrive, or if we must undertake the revision process is really a bit unnerving.

And for those that say, "its a beta, you should expect this!", to them I say, "it is not a developer beta, it is a public beta and Tim talks it up as such."

 

[Asclepio]

fusion drive is a SCAM

 

[fruitpunch.ben]

It still hasn't been released and no one has been harmed in anyway. If you consider a tester running beta 1 to be harmed because they have to re-install you really don't understand the process at all.

That’s the trouble you get when you have ‘public betas’.
The public doesn’t know what a beta is and will install it expecting everything to work perfectly, and blame Apple when it doesn’t. But I guess the benefits outweigh the bad press or they wouldn’t keep doing it...

 

[Cloudane]

Wouldn't count on it getting it later - I've followed Apple for a while, this is the kind of thing they pull to entice you into upgrading. Macs are lasting too long.

If it's anything like Continuity the hackers will release a tool to force it to work sooner or later

 

[wigby]

It supports your hardware. You just don't get the new file system. Your computer can still be updated to High Sierra and enjoy all the other features.

My mistake. I confused public beta testers with final release users. Thanks.
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High Sierra supports your hardware (and that of millions of other Mac users) just fine. It's just that, for those people with Fusion drives, they will not be converted to APFS. Everything else will still work.

My mistake. I confused public beta testers with final release users. Thanks.

 

[JeffyTheQuik]

Made me a bit nervous doing the change, but having the backup of 2.4TB of data made it easy. Total downtime: 13 hours. Total nervousness: 8/10

Note to people doing this: Have a different admin name, like "admin" than the original admin on your computer for the restore, or else you'll have two of them, and have to rename one.

When I did the Internet restore, it pulled in Sierra, not High Sierra (I think due to High Sierra not being released yet)

 

[eatrains]

Sad, but totally Apple these days. Marketing screamed, "Release it" and the minions will, no matter whether its ready or not, management just sits back and counts its money.

Did you not read the article? They're NOT releasing something that's not ready. Pay attention next time, or you'll just end up looking like a fool.

 

[BaltimoreMediaBlog]

And for his next trick, Timmy will discontinue all Apple support for Mac Pros and urge all current owners to buy a Mac Mini instead.

Timmy sure is on a roll. They should have announced September as his "Bag O' Hurt" Tour.

 

[chrono1081]

Although this sucks for Fusion Drive owners, I do have to say I'd much rather Apple get it right when it comes to the file system even if it means waiting for support for additional drive types.

 

[emulajavi]

To be fair it's easy to do while not official yet...like very easy

Hi.

Currently I have a late 2015 iMac with:

128GB SSD + 2TB HDD (Fusion Drive)
Using Bootcamp, the 2TB HDD is partitioned to 2 x 1TB and Windows is installed on one of the 1TB partitions.


I’d be very pleased if Bootcamp did this:

Keep OS X on:
Partition of 64GB on the SSD + Partition of 1TB on the HDD (Fusion Drive)

Install Windows:
on the other 64GB of the SSD (C: on Windows) + making available 1TB of the HDD for Windows files (D: on Windows)

This looks simple but I know that there are OS X Recovery Partitions and Windows Recovery partitions that need their place and I don’t want it all to be messed up if I do it manually or what could happen if, when having my desired setup, I need to reinstall from scratch Windows or OS X.


How easy is it?

Thank you.