Updating Sierra to BigS queries.

[pratikjain134]

Hi,
I have iMac 2017 27inch with a 2TB Fusion drive which I use for my professional video editing work. It's been on Sierra 10.12.6 for a really long time but I can see the software support dropping these days and I am forced to update to the new OS. I am planning to update to BigS soon and had a few doubts related to drives which I wanted to discuss here. Would be great to get opinion form like-minded people.

1. My current Fusion drive is on macOS Extended Journal. Do you think that should be formated to APFS? I did read a few articles on this and they suggested APFS for fusion is a NO!

2. If I decide to keep the drive as macOS Extended Journal should I format this fusion drive and install the new OS just to start fresh or just update the OS over it? (I will be using a PenDrive to install BigS, have done the necessary steps to make it bootable. I have a backup of all my Data)

3. If I format this Fusion drive. Do I have to just go in disk utility and format it as macOS Extended Journal before installing the OS or there is some other procedure? I did read some articles where users lost the Fusion drive setup and had a split drive.

Thank you.

 

[allan.nyholm]

I have a 2015 iMac and I've previously run with a Fusion Drive and

1) I've haven't had any errors using Fusion Drive converting to APFS on macOS Catalina.
I've since split my Fusion Drive because what I did was a Fusion Drive, but my Mac wasn't bought with a Fusion Drive - I made what I had into one.

2) If you already have the notion that your system with macOS Sierra is intact and hasn't had much tinkering(kexts and injections in the form of various third party apps) Then I would think you could update. Personally, coming from that far back I would clean install Big Sur from your PenDrive.
You won't escape the APFS conversion - it's made automatically. There's a few users on here who go out of their way to keep macOS on macOS Extended Journaled no matter what. I'm not one.
I thought about it, sure. I'm not that rebellious when it comes to filesystems.

3)
Yes, you would just have to use Disk Utility to re-format your Fusion Drive.
I have always split my self-made Fusion Drive; and then re-merge the to drives I used. I don't think I've ever just reformatted a Fusion Drive, but the Disk Utility does have a good UI for easy spotting of your Fusion Drive and you should be able to re-format that drive.

For splitting your Fusion Drive the Terminal would help you more in that regard.

diskutil apfs deleteContainer "yourdiskhere"

e.g

diskutil apfs deleteContainer disk5

This will detach your Fusion Drive and take them both to macOS Extended Journaled. That's my personal experience.

I just realized that if your drives aren't yes APFS the above command doesn't do anything for macOS Extended Journaled Fusion Drives - I suggest just typing in

diskutil

In a Terminal window to see what options it has

Edit: Apparently there's this for your Fusion Drives using diskutil

resetFusion (Reset the components of a machine's Fusion Drive)

 

[pratikjain134]

macOS has actually supported Apple’s new file system APFS on Fusion Drives for well over a year: beta versions of High Sierra could convert Fusion Drives to its version 2 APFS between June-September 2017, but this support was pulled at the last minute from High Sierra’s release version. When you now upgrade a Mac with a startup Fusion Drive to Mojave, that drive will be converted to APFS; you don’t have an option.

So you are right that APFS will be the default. Do I need to have any driver updates on Sierra to do APFS? I did notice someone having an issue while jumping from the old OS to new.

 

[allan.nyholm]

macOS has actually supported Apple’s new file system APFS on Fusion Drives for well over a year: beta versions of High Sierra could convert Fusion Drives to its version 2 APFS between June-September 2017, but this support was pulled at the last minute from High Sierra’s release version. When you now upgrade a Mac with a startup Fusion Drive to Mojave, that drive will be converted to APFS; you don’t have an option.

So you are right that APFS will be the default. Do I need to have any driver updates on Sierra to do APFS? I did notice someone having an issue while jumping from the old OS to new.

I haven't read too much into these issues people are having - it's a filesystem for reading and writing files in combination with an OS, not a one-armed man trying to open a jar of pickles. I bet that would be harder.

If you are to update to Big Sur - you will notice that

The volume LogiLink SSD was formatted by diskmanagementd (1412.141.1) and last modified by apfs_kext (1677.50.1).

As an example. That text is from an external SSD in an USB enclosure formatted to APFS. I am willing to bet that Big Sur, like macOS Catalina before it will automatically update to APFS and drivers for the filesystem are taken care of with Big Sur doing it's thing while installing. Then of course, the installer restarts after a few minutes or so and does the actual installation onto the drive of your choosing. Big Sur will take a long while to install. For me it takes a good 30 minutes or so. And recently my iMac got a firmware update that Big Sur took care of - that time it took even longer to install Big Sur, because there were extra wait-time for reboots and ding dongs.

EDIT Just to write that APFS for hard disk drives are automatically set to be formatted as APFS if you format them from either Recovery Mode or when in a macOS Big Sur session after the fact. The thing I have read about APFS was all to do with hard disk drives. After this time from the introduction of APFS by Apple till now - I would imagine that APFS has made some leaps forward to fix what ever was wrong before.. But as far as imagining things - I do that a lot. This comment from me is all just one person's experiences after having used and formatted to APFS many times +20 times and installed Big Sur 11.0.1(latest version) 3 times - perhaps this is even my fourth. I forget.

 

[pratikjain134]

Thank you for clearing my doubts. I'll update here when I make the shift in the coming days. Thank you once again.