On May 18, 2024, at 6:47 PM, Andrew Buc <abuc@...> wrote:
My local Mac tech says he¡¯s had a couple of clients who upgraded to MacOS 10.14 or higher with a rotating HDD. It wasn¡¯t long before they were begging to upgrade to SSD¡¯s.
From Mike Bombich of Carbon Copy Cloner fame:
"I'm convinced that Apple made a fundamental design choice in APFS that makes its performance worse than HFS+ on rotational disks. Performance starts out at a significant deficit to HFS+ (OS X Extended) and declines linearly as you add files to the volume."
...
"The other time that the performance difference will be starkly noticeable is when you're booting macOS from a rotational HDD. macOS seeks and stats thousands of files during the startup process, and if that's taking 15 times longer on a rotational disk, then your 30-second startup process is going to turn into 8 minutes. When the system does finally boot, the system and apps will still feel sluggish as all of your applications load, and those applications each stat hundreds of files. The system is still usable, especially as a rescue backup device, but it's not the kind of experience you'd want for a production startup disk nor for a high-stress restore scenario."
An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives
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Randy B. Singer
Co-author of The Macintosh Bible (4th, 5th, and 6th editions)
Essential But Hard To Find Macintosh Software and Advice
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