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Should I reformat my HDD?

  • Yes

    Votes: 1 33.3%
  • No

    Votes: 2 66.7%

  • Total voters
    3

EmmaL20

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 23, 2017
11
4
Main Topic:

Upon opening disk utility I noticed my internal hard drive (HDD not SSD)was seen as APFS formatted?

Not sure if it has anything to do with my hard drive's poor performance but it really feels like the drive is on the verge of death and I don't know if I should just reformat the whole thing.

Side Note:

In the best case scenario I'd love to be able to just open up my iMac to change the HDD to SSD but it's quite costly to do it and the process seems kinda difficult.

Any advice would be appreciated
 

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ThinkYEAH

macrumors newbie
Jan 5, 2019
8
1
Check if your drive health is ok, in case that drive is okay then you may try formating it, if health is not good then buy a ssd.

Regards
 

Crash0veride

macrumors regular
Oct 10, 2016
221
143
Cincinnati
I don’t know how long it’s been since it updated, but HDDs are supposed to have slower intial performance as APFS has some background defrag tasks for HDDs, but in the end APFS performance difference hasn’t been noticeably different on externals for me. if it’s terribly terribly slow, i would guess there’s else on your system slowing things as well.
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,279
13,377
What year was the iMac made?
Does it have USB3?

If the answer is yes, you can greatly improve its performance WITHOUT opening it up (or paying to have someone do it) by adding an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD and setting that up to become your boot drive.

It's cheap, it's easy, and ANYONE can do this. That means you.

But you need USB3.
Do you have it?
 

ludykriz

macrumors member
Mar 31, 2016
40
3
I have a flash drive hooked on a PCI card that is APFS and would like to re-format it to Journaled and install OSX on.. how do I do that? Disk Utility doesnt even see that drive..
 

Fishrrman

macrumors Penryn
Feb 20, 2009
29,279
13,377
"I have a flash drive hooked on a PCI card that is APFS and would like to re-format it to Journaled and install OSX on.. how do I do that? Disk Utility doesnt even see that drive.."

You could start out by telling us what kind of Mac you have and what year it was made...
 

ludykriz

macrumors member
Mar 31, 2016
40
3
its 2012 mac pro.. but i took it to the apple store and they hooked it up to a virtual mojave and wiped it that way..
 

ThinkYEAH

macrumors newbie
Jan 5, 2019
8
1
What year was the iMac made?
Does it have USB3?

If the answer is yes, you can greatly improve its performance WITHOUT opening it up (or paying to have someone do it) by adding an EXTERNAL USB3 SSD and setting that up to become your boot drive.

It's cheap, it's easy, and ANYONE can do this. That means you.

But you need USB3.
Do you have it?

Well said :D
 
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