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cMP with PCIe SSD: To APFS, or not to APFS?

iamMacPerson

iamMacPerson

macrumors 68040
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Jun 12, 2011
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I've been reading back and forth on here and Tonyx86 about converting disks to APFS with High Sierra. My machine is still running Sierra, but I'm looking to finally upgrade as it seems High Sierra is stable enough. People are going back and forth on issues with APFS, so now that it's been out for almost 5 months, what's the final conclusion for the cMP? I have a PCIe SSD I pulled from my MacBook Pro in it, so I'm trying to decide if the performance gain would be significant enough to jump. Thoughts? Also, the installer is prompting me to do a firmware update. Any problems with flashed 4,1s?

(cMP 4,1 -> 5,1, dual X5675s, GeForce 970, 256GB Apple/Samsung PCIe SSD)
 
Firmware update has been fine. In general APFS works as long as you aren't doing anything special. And can't access from Sierra so make sure to get a good backup first.
 
I'm running two installs of HS on PCIe SSD's. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is it useable? Yes, completely.

It's the future of macOS so you may as well jump in the waters fine.... MHO

I bounce back and forth between macOS and Win 10 using BootChamp without issues.
 
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iamMacPerson said:
I've been reading back and forth on here and Tonyx86 about converting disks to APFS with High Sierra. My machine is still running Sierra, but I'm looking to finally upgrade as it seems High Sierra is stable enough. People are going back and forth on issues with APFS, so now that it's been out for almost 5 months, what's the final conclusion for the cMP? I have a PCIe SSD I pulled from my MacBook Pro in it, so I'm trying to decide if the performance gain would be significant enough to jump. Thoughts? Also, the installer is prompting me to do a firmware update. Any problems with flashed 4,1s?

(cMP 4,1 -> 5,1, dual X5675s, GeForce 970, 256GB Apple/Samsung PCIe SSD)
Click to expand...

I may be mistaken, but I don't believe you'll be able to use the PCIe SSD as a boot drive on the cMP. You can use it as a working disk though.

As for everything else, I also have a flashed 4,1, and I have no issues with HS. I have a SATA SSD running though a PCIe card to get SATA3 speeds, and I haven't had any trouble with APFS. I get the max speeds out of my SSD with TRIM enabled.
 
Darmok N Jalad said:
I may be mistaken, but I don't believe you'll be able to use the PCIe SSD as a boot drive on the cMP. You can use it as a working disk though.

As for everything else, I also have a flashed 4,1, and I have no issues with HS. I have a SATA SSD running though a PCIe card to get SATA3 speeds, and I haven't had any trouble with APFS. I get the max speeds out of my SSD with TRIM enabled.
Click to expand...

I’ve actually had no problems with Sierra and the PCIe drive, just no Bootcamp (but I use VMware anyway). Could this be a problem in HS? Seeing as how you’re using a SATA3 card with it, I think I should be fine. The PCI disk mounts the same way (as and external device).
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Dr. Stealth said:
I'm running two installs of HS on PCIe SSD's. Is it perfect? Not yet. Is it useable? Yes, completely.

It's the future of macOS so you may as well jump in the waters fine.... MHO

I bounce back and forth between macOS and Win 10 using BootChamp without issues.
Click to expand...

Yeah that’s my thought too. I’ve been using it on my MBP and it’s finally gotten to the point where it’s usable again. 13.0-13.2 still had major bugs. 13.3 seems to have ironed a lot out, but like you said it’s not perfect.

The whole thing for me is the HEVC support. My MBP doesn’t have HEVC hardware acceleration, so it chokes on any 4K footage I throw at it in FCPX. I’m hoping my cMP will be a lot better, and I’m eyeing an RX 580 in the near future.
 
I've had some stability issues with APFS installed on my SSD. The crash often was in the APFS driver. There might have been other issues causing this.
I removed APFS for now and am purely HFS+ for all my drives.
I do not see a performance difference except for file copy on the same volume. But I do see much faster boot times on HFS+ (15sec vs 3 min. on APFS.)
Conversion down the line will be easy, once there are more advantages and it has gone through bug fixes.
 
haralds said:
I've had some stability issues with APFS installed on my SSD. The crash often was in the APFS driver. There might have been other issues causing this.
I removed APFS for now and am purely HFS+ for all my drives.
I do not see a performance difference except for file copy on the same volume. But I do see much faster boot times on HFS+ (15sec vs 3 min. on APFS.)
Conversion down the line will be easy, once there are more advantages and it has gone through bug fixes.
Click to expand...

Just completed the upgrade and went with APFS. So far, no problems. The system seems be loading apps just a smidge faster, but boot up time has remained the same for me.
 
h9826790 said:
PCIe ACHI SSD is bootable on cMP.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I think I was referring to NVMe drives. I remember reading somewhere that the cMP won’t boot from them. I was looking into going the AHCI route, but I didn’t want to spend that much. I didn’t know if it would make that much of a difference with the older CPUs.
 
I would suggest sticking with HFS+ if you are using non-Apple issued SSDs in cMP. Personally had pretty major SSD write speed issues after APFS "upgrade" from HFS+ after one of the security updates. Cloned the APFS system drive to an HFS+ formatted drive, replaced, and write speed was perfectly fine again.

Issue does not impact MacBookPro Apple SSDs at all.
 
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macuser453787 said:
I intend to do this when updating to HS, which probably won't be until at least 13.4.

Will clone my PCIe SSD boot drive to a platter drive, update to HS on the platter drive to retain HFS+, then clone the updated platter drive back to the SSD.
Click to expand...
I believe you can run a command from terminal to initiate the HS install and not convert to APFS, unless Apple has stopped allowing it.

http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sierra/

Edit:
I found this site to be more helpful. Just tried it, and I was able to clean install HS with no APFS.
https://malcont.net/2017/09/how-to-...sierra-without-filesystem-change-hfs-to-apfs/
 
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