They have said APFS works with raid arrays, yet I read High Sierrea will NOT install in any way on an array (APFS or not). Anyone hear anything further to this... it was broght up over a year ago on their developer forums... BTW, my array is my boot drive.
After a two-day weekend, upgrading my 2009 Mac Pro with 5,1 firmware, and a Sonnet Tempo SSD PCI card. I have "some" progress.
I decided to install (HS-10.13) to the back-up 1 TB drive I use to do firmware updates and to get the latest recovery partition. Things went without a hitch to that point.
I have two Crucial M500s installed, a little old, but running SOLID. I ran disk utility and used the new RAID Assistant, and was kinda pumped. Only one problem. I formatted the two drives as APFS slice0, slice1.
I used the RAID Assistant, and I was only able to format the RAID Volume as Extended HFS (two options casesense/not).
But I tried to format the BUILT RAID 0 Volume, to APFS after, and it did format it, I also CCC 5'd the Booting HS back to the APFS RAID, but containers got weird.
When I updated the 2009, w 5,1 FW, it did the APFS FW update without a hitch, as a side note.
But when I went to choose the RAID on the PCI Card, that was formatted APFS, I could not bless the drive , got an error
So I had to re-do re-build, and just left it as HFS+
I CCC 5'd the BOOT drive back to the newly created HFS+ RAID 0, and viola, booting no problems.
I was thinking about booting into Recovery off the internal CMD-R partition, and doing the "Convert to APFS" option but...
I heard some rumors of some drives not being able to format as APFS, which is false, even tho they are SSD, so...
I went to my 2011 MacBook Pro, with a bum video card and did my CCC update swap back routine to get it to HS. But THIS machine couldn't see the APFS Boot Drive, even with option down boot, altho it was able to bless it. This machine didn't do a FW update tho? hmm
The 2011 MBP 17" has the SAME Model M500 Crucial drive in it.
Neither machine could Boot off APFS, RAID or NOT.
MY HUNCH is like old world / new world days, if your mac has a BLACK BOOT screen with WHITE Apple Logo, you probably can boot off of an APFS drive, if you don't there are no guarantees. Like you might be able to off a 2012 but I highly believe if you have an "iOS" Black Boot, you'll be able to do APFS SOLO DRIVE booting.
RAID...
NO IT WON'T WORK. Just format your RAID HFS+ and CCC 5' it back.
There is this workaround to install and not convert, had I known THE ABOVE ^^^ what I just posted, I would have just done this:
http://osxdaily.com/2017/10/17/how-skip-apfs-macos-high-sierra/
TWICE!!
That's my Advice!
Laters...
