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[krs]

Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To
Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To

I remember discussing this on this forum in the early days of APFS,just not in the detail that linked article provides.
The way I see it, the described APFS operation is the same on a spinner and SSD, the only difference is that the SSD doesn't have the read/write delays a spinner has.
However, something else came to mind reading the article.
Let's say one has an original file and a copy of it in two different folders on a drive -I actually have a lot of those.
And say the original file becomes corrupt.
With HFS+ I can just go to the copy of that file and use it instead.
But with APFS, since there is no real copy, would that mean I lost that file ompletely or does APFS somehow handle that situation?

 

[MacInWin]

The way I see it, the described APFS operation is the same on a spinner and SSD, the only difference is that the SSD doesn't have the read/write delays a spinner has.

Exactly. APFS is optimized for SDD, not RDHD.

Let's say one has an original file and a copy of it in two different folders on a drive -I actually have a lot of those.
And say the original file becomes corrupt.
With HFS+ I can just go to the copy of that file and use it instead.
But with APFS, since there is no real copy, would that mean I lost that file ompletely or does APFS somehow handle that situation?

Apple has not been forthcoming about how APFS actually handles things. The article is from 2017, when APFS first arrived on the scene and was the result of experimentation at OWC. They even mentioned in the article having to create software to monitor where on the drive the data was being stored dynamically. But here is an interesting read on the technology:

How can you tell whether a file has been ‘cloned’ in APFS?

APFS can ‘clone’ files when copying or duplicating them within the same volume. But how can you tell whether any given file is a clone?

eclecticlight.co

In addition, on M1/2 and machines with the T2 chip, the internal drive is automatically encrypted and files are stored as sparse files, i.e., compressed. As the file is read into memory, it is unencrypted and expanded to the original. You can read this, it's toward the end of the article:

Last Week on My Mac: macOS at 20, APFS at 4

Mac OS X has come a long way in the last 20 years, and APFS has just had its 4th birthday. But has this brought the changes we expected?

eclecticlight.co

And finally, this on on how APFS copies, moves, and clones files.

Copy, move and clone files in APFS, a primer

What happens when you copy a large file to the same volume, or duplicate it, on the same APFS volume? Here are the answers.

eclecticlight.co

EDIT: More to your exact point, that last article says this:

More sinister are its implications for data integrity. Take for example a 100 GB video file, from which two copies are made to enable changes to be made to the end. When those edits are complete, the structure of the three files is:
File 1: ABC
File 2: ABD
File 3: ABE
with A and B as data common to all three, resulting from the original cloning. If corruption now occurs to the data in A or B, all three files become corrupt unless that takes place through the file system and triggers the use of separate storage. Thus, failure in a storage block or ‘bit rot’ damages all three files at once. Currently, there doesn’t appear to be any means of discovering which data are common to more than one file, which makes this difficult to detect or understand. All the user will see is that suddenly all three files are broken. Neither are there any tools capable of ‘de-cloning’ files.

 

[pm-r]

Having said that there are printers out there that are compatible with pre Mojave operating systems so i'm wondering why maseevel chose this particular printer?

+1. Ditto.

As I also wondered and asked about back in my #2 reply post.



- Patrick
=======

 

[pm-r]

Apple gives no warning that folks with a RDHD will suffer a performance hit. That's negligence at best.

I am certainly not a programmer or developer, but I often wonder how efficient their recent MacOS versions are and are they just relying on the later install solid state drives to keep the speeds up.

They certainly don't seem to have much time to spend between releases to concentrate on getting the OS itself as efficient as possible, nor do they seem to have any reason to do so.

Even when I installed a SSD in my 2011 27" iMac, which I was fortunate enough to be able to do, I was sometimes taken aback by the apparent slowness of some operations.



- Patrick
=======

 

[MacInWin]

They certainly don't seem to have much time to spend between releases to concentrate on getting the OS itself as efficient as possible, nor do they seem to have any reason to do so.

Patrick, I don't know how Apple manages software development, but every company I worked for in my IT career from the 1970's until I retired 10 years ago had a "leapfrog" development. One team would be working out the kinks in the next release, identifying bugs, fixing them, or at least documenting them for later repair if the release was close. Sometimes, they had to remove pieces/parts of the pending release because they just couldn't be fixed on time. That was the "next release" team.

Another team would be working on the design of the release after that one, getting the updated code from the first team as it was in work and making changes to it for whatever features/functions that were to be added in that following release. In addition, they got handed anything that had been cut from the upcoming release to be added to their work.

Once the software was released, the first team started work on the third iteration, with the second team now working on the next release, with the planned release date as their deadline.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat. The life of a programming team in a large company.

I wouldn't be surprised if Apple didn't have even more teams, working 3-4 releases away on the hardware in the laboratory stage. As a hardware company, they are eternally in the build it/try it mode to see what comes next. So, somewhere in Apple is a team working with M3 or M4 (or even maybe M5) chips, with a version of the OS that may someday become version 16, or 17. If they don't, they are falling behind.

And no company works to get ALL bugs out or ALL features they thought of included. At some point the software has to be released. If you try to go for ALL, you get NONE because no non-trivial software was EVER perfect. You get to a state where it is "acceptable" and you release it. And keep working on it.

 

[krs]

Maybe Patrick is thinking of Snow Leopard - it was presented as a "clean-up"release with few new features but cleaned up and optimized code.
Has there been another one since?

 

[krs]

Exactly. APFS is optimized for SDD, not RDHD.

We talked a bit about the issues using APFS with spinner drives, that's eay to understand, but how exactly is APFS optimized for SSD's compared to HFS+ on an SSD?
The main thing that sticks in my mind regarding APFS is that Apple has locked down the core macOS even more.
Seems to me it's not that APFS is optimized for SSDs but the other way around, that SSDs are required (or better preferred) to run APFS to make the issues discussed transparent to the user.

 

[MacInWin]

We talked a bit about the issues using APFS with spinner drives, that's eay to understand, but how exactly is APFS optimized for SSD's compared to HFS+ on an SSD?
The main thing that sticks in my mind regarding APFS is that Apple has locked down the core macOS even more.
Seems to me it's not that APFS is optimized for SSDs but the other way around, that SSDs are required (or better preferred) to run APFS to make the issues discussed transparent to the user.

APFS takes advantage of the fact that SSDs can be directly randomly accessed, so fragmentation doesn't impact performance at all, unlike rotating drives. So APFS actually creates fragmentation, to speed up overall read/write performance. But on a rotating drive, that approach quickly slows down the drive as the heads and platters have to be moved all over the place and waited for.

Apple obviously believes that SSDs are the future technology and have left RDHDs behind. Just as they did with CD-ROM, USB-A and other older standards.

 

[Bill Gates Jr.]

Make and model # of your new printer?

 

[pm-r]

APFS takes advantage of the fact that SSDs can be directly randomly accessed, so fragmentation doesn't impact performance at all, unlike rotating drives. So APFS actually creates fragmentation, to speed up overall read/write performance. But on a rotating drive, that approach quickly slows down the drive as the heads and platters have to be moved all over the place and waited for.

I was having a look at the fragmentation of my OWC SSD Mac OS Extended (Journaled) GPT (GUID Partition Table) drive using iDefrag.app and was quite surprised how little fragmentation there was, which was well under 0.01% at most for all files.

No defragging software or TRIM support utilities has been enabled other than whatever is included with or used by the OWC SSD drive and they say no TRIM enabling is necessary.



- Patrick
=======

 

[krs]

I was having a look at the fragmentation of my OWC SSD Mac OS Extended (Journaled) GPT (GUID Partition Table) drive using iDefrag.app and was quite surprised how little fragmentation there was, which was well under 0.01% at most for all files.

No defragging software or TRIM support utilities has been enabled other than whatever is included with or used by the OWC SSD drive and they say no TRIM enabling is necessary.



- Patrick
=======

Yes,
Last time I looked at fragmentation on my Macs still using HFS+ there was barely any fragmentation either. That defrag is not required was actually one of the benefits of that file system and that sure turned out to be true every time I checked.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

I was having a look at the fragmentation of my OWC SSD

Since SSD's can be randomly accessed instantly, and because they have no physical disk to access, the concept of fragmentation on an SSD is entirely irrelevant. Furthermore, no SSD should EVER be de-fragmented, as doing so will damage the SSD. I would keep any defragmentation utility, such as iDefrag, far away from any SSD.

No ... TRIM support utilities has been enabled other than whatever is included with or used by the OWC SSD drive and they say no TRIM enabling is necessary.

If it is an external SSD and you are using a version of the Mac OS prior to Monterey, the question of enabling TRIM is moot. It can't be done. It CAN be done if you are running Monterey though:

GAMINGDEPUTY

‏‏‎‎‏‏‎ ‎News, Reviews & Insights

www.gamingdeputy.com

If you have an internal SSD, TRIM may not be necessary (OWC SSD's do some garbage collection via ROM), but it is highly valuable to enable it if you want your SSD to last longer and perform better, especially as it gets older.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

Last time I looked at fragmentation on my Macs still using HFS+ there was barely any fragmentation either. That defrag is not required was actually one of the benefits of that file system and that sure turned out to be true every time I checked.

Macintosh rotating disk hard drives formatted as HFS+ automatically do file de-fragmentation (unless the file is gigantic). However, they do no disk de-fragmentation (i.e. the space between files) whatsoever.

So RDHD fragmentation is irrelevant until your drive starts to become so full that there are no longer any large contiguous chunks of free space to write to. At that point, even if your Mac is reporting that you have many megabytes of free space left, for all intents and purposes it is full.

If you continue to use your RDHD once there are no large chunks of free contiguous space left, your Mac will start to get slow and flaky, and in short order you may even suffer data loss. Many users are shocked when their RDHD is done at 80% full or even less.

Much more discussion at:

Macintosh Routine Maintenance
Macintosh Routine Maintenance
Items #5 and Note #1

 

[unblocktheplanet]

Things to keep in mind:

- If your mini has an internal rotating disk hard drive, and you upgrade to OS 10.14 or later, your internal rotating disk hard drive will be non-optionally reformatted to APFS, and your entire Mac forevermore will take a very noticeable hit in performance and often display the rotating beachball when you go do certain things (that involve disk access). I very strongly recommend that you stand pat at OS 10.13 if your mini has an internal rotating disk hard drive.

2015 MBP 15" / MacOS 10.13.6

I had 10.14 installed on my failed SSD. I had not noticed that uses APFS. I had a new SSD installed with a fresh OS 10.13.6. Yes, APFS. I don't see beachball but some stuff is noticeably slower with APFS, particularly wake from sleep.

Nothing wrong, exactly, with Mojave, just remember liking High Sierra better. Did I ruin things performance-wise? Thx.

 

[Randy B. Singer]

2015 MBP 15" / MacOS 10.13.6

I had 10.14 installed on my failed SSD. I had not noticed that uses APFS. I had a new SSD installed with a fresh OS 10.13.6. Yes, APFS. I don't see beachball but some stuff is noticeably slower with APFS, particularly wake from sleep.

...Did I ruin things performance-wise?

APFS is optimized for SSD's. APFS slows down rotating disk hard drives. So, no, you didn't ruin the performance of your Macintosh by formatting the new SSD as APFS.

If you are seeing a difference in performance from one SSD to another, I'd take a closer look at the specs of the old SSD compared to the specs of the new SSD.

 

[pm-r]

I would keep any defragmentation utility, such as iDefrag, far away from any SSD.

Thanks Randy, and not to worry, I was only using iDefrag to check out the fragmentation on the SS D. My other external drives are HDD spinners that are used for CCC backups and archived storage.

If it is an external SSD and you are using a version of the Mac OS prior to Monterey, the question of enabling TRIM is moot. It can't be done.

The OWC SSD is used as my internal boot Drive and I am running Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.5.
System information says: TRIM Support: No
No TRIM utilities enabled

If you have an internal SSD, TRIM may not be necessary (OWC SSD's do some garbage collection via ROM), but it is highly valuable to enable it if you want your SSD to last longer and perform better, especially as it gets older.

As I mentioned my internal boot drive is an OWC SSD that does its own sort of TRIM.

All in all, it seems to be working fairly well, and gave this older 2011 iMac a bit of a speed boost, at least for most things.




- Patrick
=======