APFS or HFS+ with Mojave on external Thunderbolt SSD

[Mogulbuster]

Just about to install an external Samsung 860EVO SSD in an external Thunderbolt case to my old iMac 14.2 with spinning disks.
The plan is to just clone my HDD to the SSD with CCC and run Mojave from the new external.
As I understand after lurking around a bit, I have the choice to format the SSD to APFS or HFS+, and still be able to boot from it..
Any suggestions on this?
Thanks in advance

 

[Juicy Box]

APFS is the future, and supposed to be faster, and it might be faster when used by the OS, but I did lots of testing with an external TB drive and didn't see any real difference between the two.

Being an older Mac, I would probably go with HFS, in case I ever wanted to partition the drive for older OS versions.

If I was considering using 10.15 with the drive in the future, or just plan on staying with 10.14, I would probably go with APFS.

 

[Mogulbuster]

Thanks, I think I’ll try out APFS and see how it works out..
Cheers!

 

[dcmaccam]

Keep us posted on how you find it.

 

[Mogulbuster]

So, all worked out nicely. Installed the 860 EVO in a TB DeLock 42510, hooked it up and formatted it to APFS and cloned my HDD to it. Rebooted and tried it out, and boy what a difference.. Feels like a new iMac suddenly. Set it up to be my start up disk and enabled TRIM. If it really makes a difference, I don't know but why not? I'm planning to run Mojave for the nearest future and might upgrade to Catalina eventually, but right now I'm very happy with the setup. Good to go for another couple of years. My main and heavier use is photo editing on Capture One 12, and it really feels much snappier than before. If you have any thoughts about prolonging the use of your older iMac instead of buying a new one, try this out, worked like a charm..
Any suggestions for my setup? I now have an internal 1TB 7200 HDD where the old OS is, a 4TB G-Tech HDD with an OS clone, Time machine and a backup for my photos plus the 860 EVO from where I'll run the iMac from now on..

 

[dcmaccam]

Thanks for the update. I too have a similar situation but with a 2011 iMac. I put an EVO 500GB drive in a LaCie Tough Thunderbolt case. I have left my internal drive as it is for now. I have another LaCie Tough 2TB Thunderbolt drive connected for use as a backup. I used Blackmagic disk speed test and find I now get 348MB/s Write 386MB/s Read. What sort of speeds do you get?

 

[Mogulbuster]

Hi,
Been away for work for a couple of days..
I have close to exactly the same speeds as you've got.
Great improvement compared to the old HDD, happy with the switch.