Anyone still rocking HFS+?

[Black_Mage]

I am still using an external Western Digital Enclosure with a Thunderbolt 1 connection as an off-site storage device that uses HFS+. It requires an adapter to work with M-series Macs. When I bought it, 4 TB was a lot of storage, and I had no idea that Apple would abandon the Thunderbolt 1 port.

WD 4TB My Passport Pro Portable External Hard Drive - Thunderbolt - WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN

WD WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN WD My Passport Pro WDBRNB0040DBK-NESN DAS Array - 2 x HDD Supported - 4 TB Installed HDD Capacity - 2 x Total Bays - Thunderbolt - 0, 1, JBOD RAID Levels Portable Overview: With the unique design of an integrated Thunderbolt cable providing both power and performance, My P...

www.amazon.com

All my internal and external SSDs use APFS. I just don't see any advantage to converting the WD storage device to APFS.

 

[tonmischa]

APFS was designed for SSDs. It will work on spinning disks, but there will be performance problems.

Use HFS+ for spinning disks and APFS for SSDs.

 

[baconcat_8964]

An earlier article talked about how APFS affects HDD performance in a long term of use.

Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To

After 16 months of using and testing APFS—Apple's new file system—I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters).

eshop.macsales.com

I have several HDD for cold backups and Time Machine. All of them are on HFS+.

 

[Fishrrman]

I still use HFS+ on any and all drives where it's use is "not required" by the OS.

The OS requires that you use APFS on
- boot drives
- time machine backups (I don't use tm)
- CarbonCopyCloner and SuperDuper cloned backups.

BUT... on EVERYTHING else, I still use HFS+.
On SSDs and HDDs.
I'll continue to use it, so long as I can still do so.
I guess that's just me.

 

[VaZ]

There simply aren't any great tools to repair APFS issues so i stick to HFS+ and use DiskWarrior to repair all issues when they arise. Not to mention full clones are easy with HFS+. My Mojave is rocking a 4 x 400GB RAID HFS+ startup drive.

 

[rin67630]

The OS requires that you use APFS on
- boot drives...

Almost true: The OS requires that you use APFS on the boot partition of any OS >= Catalina.
The drive itself can carry other partitions with other formats.

 

[Fishrrman]

rin chided me with:
"The drive itself can carry other partitions with other formats."

Heh.
I'm the only Mac user you will ever meet who has hard-partitioned an m4 Mini internal SSD into four user partitions (not including the sealed system volume, etc.):
- Boot (APFS)
- Main (HFS+)
- Media (HFS+)
- Music (HFS+)