Interesting discussion of just why APFS is so slow for some operations - in particular listing 1000s of items:
https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performance-on-rotational-hard-drives
For the search app Find Any File my iMac with a Fusion drive and the old HFS is a couple of times faster than my MacBook Air with an SSD and APFS. 6 seconds for the iMac and 30 seconds for the Air. The iMac has double the number of files the Air has.
The real scandal is that Apple is still selling computers with a hard-drive!
This is one of the reasons why I didn’t upgrade above Sierra and my clients are also advised not to upgrade while they can.
I have a MacBook Air 2014 it is my coding machine and I will not change, because it is very fast with Sierra but I did the High Sierra test and it was not good I was back a few months.
APFS is for SSD only.
Use HFS+ for hard disks.
Simple thing to keep in mind.
APFS has been attributed to why buyers of newer MacBook Pros ‘feel’ that the newer machines are not faster than older models, causing damage to the perceived value of newer Apple laptops.
I know Apple doesn’t care at the moment, but I’d really like to see them optimize APFS so that’s closer to HFS+ in terms of performance, across the board.
I find it funny when people are blown away by how fast APFS is when duplicating files; because duplicating files in APFS, doesn’t duplicate the file, it’s more of a write on save technique backed by a hard link to the original file. Which can be done accomplished in HFS+.
I am sure there must be benefits to APFS over HFS+, but as a user and developer I’ve yet to encounter features that make me go wow, I must have that.
[quote=454342:@Christian Schmitz]APFS is for SSD only.
Use HFS+ for hard disks.
Simple thing to keep in mind.[/quote]
what about fusion drive??
Fusion drive is a SSD + an HDD working together to try to speed up things.
Theyd better propose cheaper SSD upgrades instead !
I found on the App Store this application:
Blackmagic Disk Speed Test
Free. It report the hard disk (SSD / HDD) write and read speeds: very surprising !
One HDD I believed (why ?) was very fast was in fact, very very slow
Also: checking the boot time (with a clock) gives a good indication about the disk speed (compare the values for many disks first).
[quote=454399:@Emile Schwarz]Fusion drive is a SSD + an HDD working together to try to speed up things.
Theyd better propose cheaper SSD upgrades instead ![/quote]
i know it is a combo, but it come new formatted as APFS. should it be formatted as HFS+ instead ??
mojave and upper are apfs only