{"id":35920,"date":"2022-05-19T15:53:51","date_gmt":"2022-05-19T19:53:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/?p=35920"},"modified":"2024-10-11T16:10:15","modified_gmt":"2024-10-11T20:10:15","slug":"should-you-continue-using-hfs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mjtsai.com\/blog\/2022\/05\/19\/should-you-continue-using-hfs\/","title":{"rendered":"Should You Continue Using HFS+?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Howard Oakley<\/a>:<\/p>\n

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The most compelling argument for retaining HFS+ is on rotating hard disks, because APFS can result in severe fragmentation, most importantly in the file system metadata, so causing degraded performance; as SSDs don’t suffer those performance penalties, this could be a good reason for continuing to use HFS+ on hard disks, while switching SSDs to APFS.<\/p>\n

That argument may hold good for storage which is in active use, such as boot disks and those containing working files, but appears less compelling in more static use, to contain relatively stable archives or backups in which there is limited turnover of files or data. Although objectively assessing the effects of fragmentation is fraught with difficulty, one basic question is whether there is any difference in performance between the file systems to begin with.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

I updated my spinning hard drives to APFS when that became necessary in order to make bootable clones. The other main benefit is that APFS snaphots on the destination are a great way to fit multiple backups onto the same drive. Previously, I used multiple partitions, which is much less space-efficient.<\/p>\n

The hidden downside is that, for reasons I don’t understand, most of my APFS backup drives take an unpredictable amount of time to mount. With HFS+ it consistently took a few seconds. With APFS, sometimes it takes a few seconds, but other times it takes 5 minutes or even an hour before I can access the drive’s contents. A few of my APFS backups do have multiple partitions. They mount in a random order. If I’m lucky, the one I need mounts first, and in that case the backup is almost always done before the other partitions have even mounted.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, the APFS volume never<\/em> auto-mounts, but it does show up in Disk Utility where—after it takes 10 minutes to launch—I can manually tell it to mount.<\/p>\n

Other times, the APFS volume does auto-mount, using the password stored in the keychain, but it shows a password prompt, anyway. Sometimes, despite trying to dismiss this dialog, it stays on-screen the entire time I’m using the drive. I try to drag it mostly off-screen so that it doesn’t block my other windows.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, generally after a kernel panic, APFS volumes don’t even show up in Disk Utility after a restart. I have to power cycle the enclosures. (Ironically, most of the kernel panics that I’ve been getting with my M1 Pro MacBook Pro seem to be related to HFS.)<\/p>\n

Previously:<\/p>\n