"Curious why HFS+ is better for data."
My thoughts (may be rational, may not be):
- For platter-based drives, APFS can cause serious fragmentation. I've found "drive thrashing" to be a problem with those platter-based drives I'm using (as boot drives) for Catalina and Big Sur.
- HFS+ (on a data drive) may be more "fixable" if the drive is having problems, because existing 3rd party diagnostic/repair software doesn't work well (or at all) with APFS.
- HFS+ can be mounted, viewed and accessed on older Macs (if need be). APFS can't.
Perhaps with SSDs, APFS will do fine with data drives.
On my own 2018 Mini (which runs Mojave), I have the internal SSD partitioned 4 ways:
- Boot - APFS
- Main - HFS+
- Media - HFS+
- Music - HFS+
But I guess that's "just me"...