Opinion: HFS+ vs APFS For External HDD Media Drive On M1

[J InTech82]

So I am buying a new external mechanical hard drive to use as a media storage drive to use on my M1 Mac mini. I have no use for Time Machine, it will purely be used for video files. Should I go with HFS or APFS? In this specific situation, what are the benefits and the disadvantages of both and which option would you choose? I have done research and I am not getting a clear answer.

 

[Fishrrman]

If the drive is platter-based, I recommend HFS+ as "the better way to go".
APFS seriously fragments platter-based drives, and in my experience, one gets a lot of "disk thrashing" as well.

 

[J InTech82]

If the drive is platter-based, I recommend HFS+ as "the better way to go".
APFS seriously fragments platter-based drives, and in my experience, one gets a lot of "disk thrashing" as well.

Very good to know, thank you for that information! HFS+ it is!

 

[ght56]

If the drive is platter-based, I recommend HFS+ as "the better way to go".
APFS seriously fragments platter-based drives, and in my experience, one gets a lot of "disk thrashing" as well.

I agree. I've been experimenting with APFS on platter drives, and while I know APFS is supposed to have defragmentation feature built into it, in practice it does not seem to work very well and performance seriously degrades as the drives get fuller.

 

[J InTech82]

I agree. I've been experimenting with APFS on platter drives, and while I know APFS is supposed to have defragmentation feature built into it, in practice it does not seem to work very well and performance seriously degrades as the drives get fuller.

That's interesting. I appreciate your insight as well! I will give my experience on Saturday evening after I am done transferring files. I don't want to jinx myself! haha

 

[pmiles]

Performance degrades immediately. APFS is the WORST file system to put on a mechanical drive, period.

You want to make your drive perform like a slug, use APFS. A lot of people got SSD drives purely because of the effect APFS has on mechanical drives when in reality, all they really needed to do was not use APFS. Mechanical drives at 7200rpm are just fine for streaming videos and certainly ideal for storage only. And you can get huge drives for pennies on the dollar compared to equivalent sized drives that are SSD.

 

[J InTech82]

Okay so now, next question, if I have several TBs of files on this old hard drive with AFPS, how slow should I be at moving over the files? I don't want to corrupt the drive in the process!

 

[architect1337]

APFS is the future of filesystems on the Mac. For the use case in question; large video files that are not going to change very much, APFS offers a slight advantage with regard to file consistency over time. Performance is not going to be an issue for this type of usecase. I would go with APFS (and have).

 

[pmiles]

I will reiterate this for visibility. NEVER EVER USE APFS ON A MECHANICAL HARD DRIVE.

There is zero positives for using APFS on a mechanical hard drive. It was never created for mechanical hard drives.

Mechanical hard drives are considered legacy devices by Apple, as such, they are not developing their OS with them in mind. Apple even warned users not to convert to APFS with mechanical hard drives all the way back to High Sierra. It was, and never will be, the filesystem to use on a mechanical hard drive. You want to use APFS, get an SSD. You have a mechanical hard drive, use HFS+ (MacOS Extended).

Can you use it? Sure, but why would you when performance improves 100% without it?

 

[architect1337]

There is no evidence to support this.

 

[pmiles]

There is no evidence to support this.

Believe what you will.

I know it to be true because I have personally experienced it. If you like running like a slug, so be it. Some people like slower machines. I can assure you your APFS drive formatted as HFS+ will perform better than it is now. If you don't notice it, you rarely use the drive. In which case, it doesn't matter whether the drive is even running at all.

 

[avz]

Believe what you will.

I know it to be true because I have personally experienced it. If you like running like a slug, so be it. Some people like slower machines. I can assure you your APFS drive formatted as HFS+ will perform better than it is now. If you don't notice it, you rarely use the drive. In which case, it doesn't matter whether the drive is even running at all.

There are many more factors (amount of RAM etc) and use cases involved.
Writing once and reading multiple (this seems to be the OP’s intention) will have little impact on fragmentation of the drive.

 

[pmiles]

The OP has long since formatted his drive... to HFS+ I might add. There is absolutely NO REASON to format a mechanical hard drive to APFS except if you are running Mojave or later on a system drive... and ONLY because you are forced to do it by the OS.

The whole notion of formatting a drive and assuming that well, I'm only going to access it once, as a reason to use APFS is absurd.