Is APFS any good on an HDD?

[Zando_]

Planning on doing a clean install of macOS High Sierra on my work Mac today (Late 2012 21.5" iMac, 8GB RAM, 2.9GHz i5, GT 650M), due to it being unexplainably slow and unresponsive, especially after booting (though it's laggy in Excel as well, strange since it was fine a month or two ago). So the question I have is: is Apple's new APFS any good on a spinning HDD? Or will it be slower than the old HFS+ or whatever?

[dalekphalm]

On 30/10/2017 at 10:43 AM, Zando Bob said:

Planning on doing a clean install of macOS High Sierra on my work Mac today (Late 2012 21.5" iMac, 8GB RAM, 2.9GHz i5, GT 650M), due to it being unexplainably slow and unresponsive, especially after booting (though it's laggy in Excel as well, strange since it was fine a month or two ago). So the question I have is: is Apple's new APFS any good on a spinning HDD? Or will it be slower than the old HFS+ or whatever?

Keep in mind the following:

1. I have never used macOS High Sierra

2. I have never used APFS

 

From my searching online, APFS has some specific optimizations for SSD's, making it the obvious choice if you were running an SSD as the boot drive. However, there don't seem to be any drawbacks of using a mechanical HDD on APFS - you just won't see the SSD specific optimizations.

 

So at this point, it really just comes down to HFS+ vs APFS general pros and cons.

 

Are you okay with the limitations of APFS and are you interested in the benefits? If so, use APFS. If you think the limitations are too big a trade off, use HFS+. There likely will be little-to-no performance difference when using a mechanical HDD.

[Zando_]

Just now, dalekphalm said:

Keep in mind the following:

1. I have never used macOS High Sierra

2. I have never used APFS

 

From my searching online, APFS has some specific optimizations for SSD's, making it the obvious choice if you were running an SSD as the boot drive. However, there don't seem to be any drawbacks of using a mechanical HDD on APFS - you just won't see the SSD specific optimizations.

 

So at this point, it really just comes down to HFS+ vs APFS general pros and cons.

 

Are you okay with the limitations of APFS and are you interested in the benefits? If so, use APFS. If you think the limitations are too big a trade off, use HFS+. There likely will be little-to-no performance difference when using a mechanical HDD.

Yep. I went ahead and installed, formatting the drive as APFS. Don't see any noticeable speed boost over a good HDD, but it's not slow or anything either. 

[dalekphalm]

1 minute ago, Zando Bob said:

Yep. I went ahead and installed, formatting the drive as APFS. Don't see any noticeable speed boost over a good HDD, but it's not slow or anything either. 

Considering the optimizations are for SSD, I'm entirely unsurprised that there's no noticeable speed boost.

[Zando_]

4 minutes ago, dalekphalm said:

Considering the optimizations are for SSD, I'm entirely unsurprised that there's no noticeable speed boost.

Yep. Though some people on older Macs actually did get a speed boost, apparently APFS does have some optimizations for read/write times on both HDDs and SSDs.