Switch to APFS for external drives?

[pjny]

Hi,

I have one mac running Sierra and another on High Sierra. I keep all my data on three external drives and would like to switch the next batch of drives all to APFS.

I upgraded my Macbook 12" to High Sierra when it was introduced but had big slowdowns such as excessive shutdown times and slow read-write speeds. I had to revert to Sierra and the performance went back to normal.

My Macbook 2011 runs High Sierra without problems. Downloading iphone photos/videos to the external drives takes forever due to conversion from HEIF to JPG. Does this conversion degrade the images? This is one of the reasons I want to switch to APFS.

Have you had any issues with APFS?

Thanks.

 

[Clix Pix]

When I downloaded and installed High Sierra on my computers, I decided to go ahead and convert my external drives to APFS as well, both platter/spinner ones and external SSDs. So far I have not had any problems with any of them, they all work just fine. I don't use HEIF formatting for my iPhone camera images, I use JPG, so can't help with regard to that.

 

[mikehalloran]

I would not run APFS on a spinner. Apple disabled that option when High Sierra was released (too many problems in beta) but you can do it in Mojave. I still wouldn't. On an SSD, I think that APFS is the best thing to happen to the Mac OS since Tiger.

I use spinners for archival storage and Time Machine anymore. Do you still have one in your 2012 MacBook? Time to pull it and install an SSD. Prices are cheap. You can get a 2T under $300 nowadays. What did yours come with—500G? List price on an 860EVO 500 is $90.

https://www.samsung.com/us/search/searchMain?listType=g&Dy=1&Nty=1&Ntt=860+EVO

 

[YuliasiliA]

I work for UK marketing company and we are looking to buy some business leads for our clients who operate across various niches. I am thinking of trying out https://wowitloveithaveit.com for these lists. Has anyone bought from this company before? Thank you in advance

 

[BugeyeSTI]

I’m running APFS on my main drive and left my externals on HFS+.. I don’t want any issues with trying to run APFS on a spinner drive

 

[Clix Pix]

I have had no issues with running APFS on any of my external drives, either older spinner ones or more current SSD ones.