APFS Is Not Optional (apple.com)

From a new Apple knowledge base article: When you upgrade to macOS High Sierra, systems with all flash storage configurations are converted automatically. Systems with hard disk drives (HDD) and Fusion drives won't be converted to APFS. You can't opt-out of the transition to APFS.

Comments

Re:Ok... and?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re the actual technical merits:

• APFS is faster
• APFS gives more accurate time stamping of files
• APFS allows concurrent access, while HFS+ has central locks, which ends up being a massive performance improvement on very multicore machines, since they're not constantly sat in spin-locks waiting on IO
• APFS supports snapshotting and copy on write
• APFS supports sparse files
• APFS's implementation of hard links actually works
• APFS has decent, not-hacked-in support for TRIM
• APFS encryption is more secure
• APFS can quickly compute the size of the contents of a directory
• APFS can do write coalescing
• APFS uses volumes, rather than partitions, letting them be dynamically resized

Looks like a nice modern filesystem

[Khopesh]

I'm not a Mac guy, so I had to look this up: Apple File System (APFS) is a decent modern filesystem with most features you'd expect from something developed somewhat recently. Here's a FS comparison where you can compare it to the latest and greatest competing formats like Linux's ex4 and Btrfs, Sun's (Oracle's) ZFS, and of course Microsoft's NTFS.

Features uncommon elsewhere include native snapshotting, encryption, and error correction.