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Benefits of APFS on Fusion Drive?
- Thread starter oggign
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All indications are that Mojave will not boot at all unless the disk is APFS, so if you want to use Mojave, you'll be using APFS.Hi guys, please enlighten me on this one, is it worth it to upgrade my Fusion Drive (1TB - iMac 5k late 2015) when Mohave comes out? Would be great if there are benchmarks on the same system
During my day to day usage, I don't see any performance hits with APFS but boot up (since HS) is painfully slow
To start, it's not possible to run the Mojave installer and not convert to APFS. Even when doing a clean install using the command line options, the old method of installing using "--converttoapfs NO" does not work anymore. I have not personally tested but have seen reports that an APFS installation cloned to an HFS+ drive will not boot either.
Edit: I did a test and cloned the APFS disk on a late 2012 iMac to an external HFS+ drive, and it does indeed start up, seemingly fine. In any case, there's still no way to install without converting so it won't surprise me if Apple gets rid of this functionality before release.
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chrfr wrote in reply 7:
"I did a test and cloned the APFS disk on a late 2012 iMac to an external HFS+ drive, and it does indeed start up, seemingly fine."
Well, there you go.
You have just proven that it IS possible to boot and run Mojave under HFS.
Even though you added:
"there's still no way to install without converting so it won't surprise me if Apple gets rid of this functionality before release"
... That's not "the point".
Of course Apple may not want the average user to install Mojave "as HFS+", and not provide any "direct way" to do so.
But... that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Again, you have just proven that it CAN be done, with your exercise above.
Question:
What app did you USE to create the clone?
CarbonCopyCloner? SuperDuper? Something else?
I'd like to try it to replicate your discovery.
Yours is the first post I've seen of someone booting and running Mojave under HFS+...
"I did a test and cloned the APFS disk on a late 2012 iMac to an external HFS+ drive, and it does indeed start up, seemingly fine."
Well, there you go.
You have just proven that it IS possible to boot and run Mojave under HFS.
Even though you added:
"there's still no way to install without converting so it won't surprise me if Apple gets rid of this functionality before release"
... That's not "the point".
Of course Apple may not want the average user to install Mojave "as HFS+", and not provide any "direct way" to do so.
But... that doesn't mean it can't be done.
Again, you have just proven that it CAN be done, with your exercise above.
Question:
What app did you USE to create the clone?
CarbonCopyCloner? SuperDuper? Something else?
I'd like to try it to replicate your discovery.
Yours is the first post I've seen of someone booting and running Mojave under HFS+...
What is the point of trying to run it under HFS+ when it is quite obvious Apple does not want us to?
Chances are, something will just go wrong sooner or later.
“It can be done” is not the same thing as “it works fine with it”.
Wando wrote:
"What is the point of trying to run it under HFS+ when it is quite obvious Apple does not want us to?"
Because "some of us" prefer HFS+ and have no interest in APFS (at least at this time, until it becomes more proven).
Let me give you another example of Apple trying to "control" what a user does:
It's in Mail.app.
When one sets up a new account, Apple makes it all-but impossible for the average user to choose a POP style setup. The app "pushes" one towards IMAP and offers no easily-seen option for POP.
It'a still possible to use POP, but one has to literally "trick" Mail.app into presenting the appropriate setup screen.
I'm a POP user and have no interest in IMAP. I will keep using POP so long as POP is able to be used.
That's just the way I want my email to operate. Nothing more to it, really. My computer, my choice.
So, to paraphrase your original statement... "it's quite obvious Apple does not want us to use POP".
BUT... it can still be used.
Told you that to tell you this:
If Apple doesn't want Mojave to run under HFS+, I believe they would make it impossible to do so.
It -is not- impossible, as chrfr demonstrated in his post above.
Apple may not WANT us to use HFS+.
BUT... it can still be used, at least at this time.
I intend to keep using it.
"What is the point of trying to run it under HFS+ when it is quite obvious Apple does not want us to?"
Because "some of us" prefer HFS+ and have no interest in APFS (at least at this time, until it becomes more proven).
Let me give you another example of Apple trying to "control" what a user does:
It's in Mail.app.
When one sets up a new account, Apple makes it all-but impossible for the average user to choose a POP style setup. The app "pushes" one towards IMAP and offers no easily-seen option for POP.
It'a still possible to use POP, but one has to literally "trick" Mail.app into presenting the appropriate setup screen.
I'm a POP user and have no interest in IMAP. I will keep using POP so long as POP is able to be used.
That's just the way I want my email to operate. Nothing more to it, really. My computer, my choice.
So, to paraphrase your original statement... "it's quite obvious Apple does not want us to use POP".
BUT... it can still be used.
Told you that to tell you this:
If Apple doesn't want Mojave to run under HFS+, I believe they would make it impossible to do so.
It -is not- impossible, as chrfr demonstrated in his post above.
Apple may not WANT us to use HFS+.
BUT... it can still be used, at least at this time.
I intend to keep using it.
By all means, do as you please, but I think you might have skipped over the second part of my post.
I’ll re-write it here for your convenience:
...Chances are, something will just go wrong sooner or later.
“It can be done” is not the same thing as “it works fine with it”.
I just installed the Mojave public beta yesterday on a 2017 iMac 5K system with a 2 TB Fusion Drive and have done several restarts. It takes about 5 seconds longer to boot up than it did previously but I’d chalk that up to this being an early beta. I’m sure they’ll make performance improvements to how AFS operates on Fusion Drives throughout the beta process.
You have to run csrutil disable from your recovery partition to enable advanced startosinstall options (like HFS+ install).
I had AFPS on my external SSD and the performance hit of that file system especially on boot up was significant. I'd be happy with 5 seconds. As it stands, I had to rebuild and reload macOS on my iMac and I opted to run off the internal drive and not deal with AFPS. I'm currently on High Sierra because of the issues with Mojave but I rather not go on AFPS when Mojave gets released.
For me as a user the biggest advantage of APFS of HFS+ is that APFS doesn't normalise characters or store letters like ä, ü, or ö as two characters. I guess there still applications which do that but I hope it will vanish. Otherwise, I can't say it feels very different to HFS+, I don't duplicate too many files for which the cloning feature is neat. The local Time Machine works better, because it just creates file system snapshots, nothing is copied. Sadly even in Mojave, the remote Time Machine will work as it always did, copying complete files and using hard links to keep it all together. I hoped for a snapshot based approach in 10.14.
The booting time is kinda meaningless, most of the time I just close the lid of my Mac.
The booting time is kinda meaningless, most of the time I just close the lid of my Mac.
I installed Mojave Public Beta from Mac App Store and it created APFS partition of space available automatically and I had successful install. I have fusion drive with 128GB SSD and 1TB drive.
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No benchmarks I'm afraid, but I've also got a 1TB Fusion drive with 128GB SSD which got converted to APFS when I installed the Mojave Public Beta. Mobile Time Machine with its local snapshots is a great feature. I got some space back with the conversion. APFS has an intelligent defragmenter for HDDs. Mojave has superb performance for me even with older applications, file system must contribute to this. High Sierra was one of the worst macOS releases imho surprising as Sierra ran great.
Not true, I run Mojave very happily on HFS.
same here, Mojave beta 4 HFS+ Raid 0 (Samsung Evo) excellent performance.
Initial phoronix benchmarks of APFS show that every workload is improved. They didn't benchmark on an HDD though, which may see less or no improvements in theory. https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=macOS-APFS-HFS-Benchmarks
I'm psyched to finally have APFS on my drive. It works fine and is hella fast on my usb 3.0 rotational 5400rpm external drive. I ran a copy of 100 movie files and it certainly maxed out the drive's performance/
I'm psyched to finally have APFS on my drive. It works fine and is hella fast on my usb 3.0 rotational 5400rpm external drive. I ran a copy of 100 movie files and it certainly maxed out the drive's performance/