 dolphinsClean Up Our Oceans
Premium Member
join:2001-08-22
Westville, NJ |
dolphins
Premium Member
2017-Sep-30 1:27 am
[macOS] Converted HDD to APFSI decided to pop in 4th HDD and give APFS a go. Yeah this is what I do on Friday nights into Saturday mornings, fun stuff.  What I've done so far. Cloned boot drive onto Disk 4 using SuperDuper!. In doing so I have an exact copy to play with while leaving my boot drive untouched plus I have a recent backup on drive 3. After cloning, Disk 4 has High Sierra installed but is HFS+ Journaled. So I boot into Recovery Mode, select Disk Utility, select Disk 4 and Unmount, then Edit, Convert to APFS. Success! 
Oddly though while still in recovery mode Disk 4 shows as an external disk after converting, it is not an external disk? While still in Recovery Mode I set Disk 4 as Startup Disk and hit Restart only to get the following error: 
So I select my good boot drive and boot normally. Once loaded I use Disk Utility to run First Aid on Disk 4, comes back clean with no errors. It now shows as internal but also shows Disk 3 as the parent disk? I check Disk Info to confirm it is bootable. 
I try going the normal route and select System Preferences, Startup and change to disk 4 but still get the above error when pressing restart? Getting tired so I'll have to pick up where I left off after some sleep.
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| dolphins |
dolphins
Premium Member
2017-Oct-2 10:09 pm
Update:
Booted into recovery mode, erased disk 4 but kept the APFS format, did a clean install of High Sierra, then used Migration Assistant to copy everything over from my main boot drive. Success!
I'm typing this from my newly formatted APFS High Sierra drive.
No external boot drive or recovery disk needed. I did this with 2 internal disks. I can now switch between the 2 boot drives, both running High Sierra and basically identical. No need for clone software. |
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 HiVolt
Premium Member
join:2000-12-28
Toronto, ON |
HiVolt
Premium Member
2017-Oct-3 12:16 pm
Is there a point of APFS on a spinning drive? I thought it was optimized for SSD's? |
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rugbyI think I know it all.
join:2000-09-26
Plainfield, IN |
rugby
Member
2017-Oct-3 1:02 pm
said by HiVolt:Is there a point of APFS on a spinning drive? I thought it was optimized for SSD's? I was wondering the same thing. There's probably a good reason Apple recommended HFS+ for spinning rust. |
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1 recommendation |
to HiVolt
said by HiVolt:Is there a point of APFS on a spinning drive? I thought it was optimized for SSD's? Absolutely! APFS may have been optimized for SSD but the benefits are still valid with platter style drives as well. Cloning for files and directories, snapshots, space sharing, fast directory sizing, atomic safe-save primitives, copy-on-write and improved filesystem fundamentals all benefit spinning drives as well. You can rad about APFS here. » developer.apple.com/libr ··· ion.html |
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dolphinsClean Up Our Oceans
Premium Member
join:2001-08-22
Westville, NJ |
to HiVolt
said by HiVolt:Is there a point of APFS on a spinning drive? I thought it was optimized for SSD's? Along with what gcerullo  said. What's good for the goose is good for the gander with HDDs being the latter. Yes, SSDs handle files differently but technically they're both storage volumes so should theoretically benefit both. I'm also allowing data usage and crash reports to be submitted to Apple to improve support for HDDs via bug reports. And because someone told me I couldn't do it.  |
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HiVolt
Premium Member
join:2000-12-28
Toronto, ON
2 recommendations |
HiVolt
Premium Member
2017-Oct-3 7:24 pm
Ah, cool...
But i think you guys are kind of playing with fire, converting drives that don't really need to be converted just yet.
I'd wait until Apple irons out the bugs, and more 3rd party utilities support it. |
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dolphinsClean Up Our Oceans
Premium Member
join:2001-08-22
Westville, NJ |
dolphins
Premium Member
2017-Oct-3 8:14 pm
No worries. I still have a my untouched main boot drive on another physical disk. Which I haven't logged into since booting up the APFS drive. So far everything works perfectly and I haven't seen the spinning beach-ball yet. No problems other than having to set permissions again since it is a clean install. |
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