APFS for fusion

[Weatheraardvark]

yes, yes it is coming I hear and yes I hope to win the lottery some day

Has anyone heard anything about when or even if Apple is going to have the APFS for the Fusion Drive owners?

I am beginning to think that they can't get it to work.

 

[UL2RA]

Like everything else Apple related ... it'll get here when it gets here. That's about all you can hope to hear at this point.

 

[casperes1996]

I am beginning to think that they can't get it to work.

The thing is that bringing APFS to hard drives, would probably only entail disabling the copy-on-write feature. Bringing it to Fusion Drives though, includes adding support for the system to intelligently manage two separate volumes that have different APFS feature sets, as copy-on-write on a hard drive would completely destroy its performance, but it's a nice feature for the SSD portion. Furthermore it also needs to be able to move data seamlessly between HDD and SSD without causing too much fragmentation. And since you wouldn't want them to tastefully put out a file system that could cause incredible slow-downs or entire loss of data, what really is the hurry? Isn't HFS+ doing fine for you right now?

 

[simonsi]

Fusion drives are probably a time-limited technology as SSD drive costs continue to fall. Given that, Apple may well not bring Fusion drive support out anytime soon...

 

[casperes1996]

Fusion drives are probably a time-limited technology as SSD drive costs continue to fall. Given that, Apple may well not bring Fusion drive support out anytime soon...

Ah, but that's exactly the reason it'd be more obvious that it comes soon rather than a long time from now. They've already said Fusion Drives will get APFS support, and if they're being phased out, that ought to happen soon. Furthermore, the concept behind a Fusion Drive could come back again. Not as in an HDD+SSD (although for mass storage systems you could be tempted to fuse your own setups), but for something like fast-XPoint+MLC Nand. All SSD, but still two tiers of performance.

 

[maflynn]

Fusion drives are probably a time-limited technology as SSD drive costs continue to fall. Given that, Apple may well not bring Fusion drive support out anytime soon...

If we see apple roll out new iMacs without Fusion, then we have our answer regarding APFS and Fusion, i.e., they'll not implement it.

I agree, Fusion is a stop gap measure that provides near SSD speeds some of the time, but a lower cost then an actual SSD.

 

[JPamplin]

Frankly, I just want to be able to install 10.13 on a Mac with a RAID0 boot drive. I used Apple's Disk Utility to make a 2-SSD 1TB SATA3 boot volume in 10.12 in a 2011 iMac 27, and I'm STILL stuck on 10.12. So much for Apple supporting Apple software! Ugh.

 

[vkd]

If it doesn't come with the next revision later this year then we'll never see it.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"Has anyone heard anything about when or even if Apple is going to have the APFS for the Fusion Drive owners?"

You don't need it.
"Stay where you are..."

Are things running ok "as they are"?
Then... why be upset?
Instead... be happy that you're not having problems like a lot of other folks fooling with High Sierra!

 

[neliason]

Isn't HFS+ doing fine for you right now?

Well, my iMac with a Fusion drive certainly still works. But HFS+ is embarrassingly old and lacking in some modern features that would make Macs better and more reliable. It was long past due we get a decent file system when APFS was released for iOS.

 

[Mac Hammer Fan]

Personally, I'm not convinced by APFS yet. Slow boot on many SSDs, snapshots and Time Machine problems cause less remaining disk space, etc... It has to be a lot improved before I switch from HFS+ to APFS. I follow the wise advice of Fishrrman.

 

[treichert]

would probably only entail disabling the copy-on-write feature

No, why would the disable that especially on slow hard disks?

 

[casperes1996]

No, why would the disable that especially on slow hard disks?

Exactly because of that. It would make them even slower.

Copy-on-write will fragment your data, which isn't at all as big of an issue on SSDs.

If we have a contiguous block of data, like this

A,B,C,D

and we then fill up some more data

A,B,C,D,1,2,3,4

And we then use the copy-on-write function to make a new reference to ABCD's inode

A,B,C,D,1,2,3,4,*

The * is the reference to ABCD. It doesn't take up any storage, simply refers back to ABCD. But now, if we make changes to our new copy, look what happen.

A,B,C,D,1,2,3,4,*,E,F,G

See the problem? To read the full ABCDEFG file, we first read from the start, and then we have to move the read-head past the 1234 block, to get the next portion of the file. Without copy-on-write, we would replace * with ABCD, and whilst it would take up more storage, we would be able to read the full, edited block contiguously.
[doublepost=1517571737][/doublepost]

Well, my iMac with a Fusion drive certainly still works. But HFS+ is embarrassingly old and lacking in some modern features that would make Macs better and more reliable. It was long past due we get a decent file system when APFS was released for iOS.

Old, yes - but what features is it you crave from APFS?

I'm not arguing against APFS. I agree it's good we're getting a modern file system. I just don't think we need to rush for it

 

[maflynn]

HFS+ is embarrassingly old and lacking in some modern features that would make Macs better and more reliable.

Well, I'm embarrassingly old and lacking modern features and all I can say is I'm glad my wife isn't looking at a new option that is more reliable

 

[casperes1996]

Well, I'm embarrassingly old and lacking modern features and all I can say is I'm glad my wife isn't looking at a new option that is more reliable

Thanks for making me giggle, man. That was funny. Though Hope your reliability isn't that bad in spite of the lack of modern features though .

 

[neliason]

Old, yes - but what features is it you crave from APFS?

I'm not arguing against APFS. I agree it's good we're getting a modern file system. I just don't think we need to rush for it

The thing I most like is the data integrity, though I wish it applied to the actual data.

 

[casperes1996]

The thing I most like is the data integrity, though I wish it applied to the actual data.

Well it kinda does. i mean, I assume you mean the atomic write operations for metadata. Now there's obviously no reason to make a similar system for brand new data (metadata or not), but if you try and overwrite existing data, it'll write the block, write the metadata block with the inode, remove the old inode reference and done. Aside from the new data being written that gives data protection. Your old data will not go away before the entire replacement operation is complete. And for delta changes it's similarly protected.

 

[jagooch]

I'm still holding my breath waiting for APFS for my iMac's Fusion drive. My face has turned a blue purple but I still refuse to breathe.

Either I'll give up and buy a new Mac or APFS for Fusion drives will be release. Stay tuned to see which one will come first.

Passing out...

 

[nsayer]

10.13.4 and STILL no APFS for Fusion.

 

[Fishrrman]

I'm thinking that Apple may have decided to NOT implement APFS for fusion.
At all.
I could be wrong.

In any case, stop worrying about it.
Use HFS+ with your fusion-equipped iMac, smile and be happy.
Running under HFS+ it's probably far less prone to problems than it would be IF it had APFS installed.

 

[Weatheraardvark]

10.13.4 and STILL no APFS for Fusion.

With all the updates we are getting on High Sierra I am of the opinon, it isn't going to happen in my life time. It isn't a priority or that they can't get it to work

 

[nsayer]

With all the updates we are getting on High Sierra I am of the opinon, it isn't going to happen in my life time. It isn't a priority or that they can't get it to work

Well, then Hair Force One was lying when he promised it was coming in a future release.

https://www.macrumors.com/2017/09/25/apfs-fusion-drive-high-sierra-update/

 

[BLUEDOG314]

I get that everyone has different storage needs but at this point we might as well break our fusion drives and use external storage as a supplement. That and if you buy an imac configure it with all flash.

 

[The Weatherman]

Any change in 10.13.5 beta 1 regarding APFS support for FD?

 

[Babygotfont]

Any change in 10.13.5 beta 1 regarding APFS support for FD?

I have a friend that knows somebody who knows somebody that insists he heard a rumor written on the bathroom wall at happy hour that APFS is coming to fusion drives, albeit under the tag name APFS-FD (fusion drives) ...