2 high sierra questions

[macgig]

upgrade went well. a few questions.

1. native encryption on the hard drive. only works with SSD drives I think I read somewhere? so that means I don't have it? I have a mechanical hard drive. This article says think twice before encrypting HFS plus volumes on high sierra? so filevault would be a bad idea now?

2. apple file system. is this only for SSD drives too, I still have HFS plus it would seem. the upgrade did not convert my hard drive to apple file system.

thanks.

 

[IWT]

Hi, nice to hear from you again.

Forgive me because I don’t recall which Mac you had.

But I can tell you that APFS only applies to SSDs and not to spinning platter hard drives or Fusion hard drives - and only started with High Sierra.

As regards File Vault, as far as I know, the type of Internal Hard Drive is not an issue. What is hotly debated is whether FV is relevant except in a very small cohort of people with very sensitive data - and the dangers of losing your password or recovery key.

Ian

 

[macgig]

thanks for the reply. appreciate it.

 

[Slydude]

Whew I ran the High Sierra beta I was able to format a regularspinning hard drive as APFS. It worked fine for me. There are two things to keep in mind when deciding what to do with traditional hard drives and APFS:

1. Regular hard drives are not automaticatically converted to APFS. You can choose to format them as APFS using Disk Utility.
2. Flash-based / SSD drives used as the boot drive are automatically converted.
3. Do not format a fusion drive as APFS under High Sierra. I didn't have many issues of consequence when I tried it during the beta but apparently some users did. According to Apple APFS formatting isn't supported on fusion drives under High Sierra.

Additional potentially helpful info.