New Apple file system

[JBSlough]

I'm wondering will I have to convert all my external drives to APFS also? I have a bunch of back ups (photos etc) and my iTunes library lives on a separate drive. Apologies if this is a dumb question.

 

[Premium1]

I'm wondering will I have to convert all my external drives to APFS also? I have a bunch of back ups (photos etc) and my iTunes library lives on a separate drive. Apologies if this is a dumb question.

This should help answer your questions
https://www.cultofmac.com/435718/apfs-new-apple-file-system/

 

[Bazza1]

This should help answer your questions
https://www.cultofmac.com/435718/apfs-new-apple-file-system/

I don't think it does. The article does say that drives converted to the new file system won't be able to be read by Yosemite and earlier, but no real other explanation of backwards compatibility between APFS and earlier AFS+ drives.

However, practical experience in the past 24 hours with High Sierra and my 'old' Time Machine / External Backup Drive HDD and a couple of flash drives suggest that the user does not 'have' to reformat to APFS. Yet.

 

[Maumentum]

Hi is it possible to return back to FAT32 from APFS, as my 32gb flash drive previously (FAT32) only recognised by High Sierra as being 2gb. Was converted to APFS in attempt to retain the rest of its capacity, this worked but my TV does not recognise it therefore no playback of videos from such devices if video is over 2gb.
Is APFS backwards convertible to FAT32? Disk Utility cannot do this.

 

[iN8ter]

I see no benefit using APFS on an external drive over HPFS+. Performance is actually worse. I don’t think it’s worth using unless you have an SSD. If it was as good as HPFS+ on mechanical drives, I think Apple would have converted all non-Fusion systems automatically...

That’s unfortunate, because the FS performance is probably the absolutely worst thing about owning a Mac without an SSD. I think that’s why Apple was very aggressive in moving to SSDs, but it strikes me as dumb that they’d use 5400 RPM drives in iMacs for so long with HPFS+...

It makes NTFS on the same drive feel almost like a Hybrid Drive. The performance difference is noticeable and it’s one of the things that jumped out to me when I got an iMac. File operations and I/O performance was worse than even cheap windows laptops with 5 year old, heavily used drives in them.