Files on your Mac can exist in one or many blocks. When I play this movie file on my computer, my Mac will first read the first block and then go straight on to read the second block it seamlessly moves from one block to the next so that, to the viewer, the movie appears as if it was a single block of data. HFS Extended is the file system Apple has been using for almost 30 years, the one which all Macs running macOS 10.12 or earlier use for their startup volumes.įor my example, I am using a 10 GB movie file, “Nina’s Birthday.mp4”, which is stored in two separate blocks of data on the volume. However, to fully understand the “copy on write” process, and the implications of using APFS with HDDs, it helps first to know how copying works with HFS Extended volumes… “Copy on write” is the magic behind the snapshot feature in APFS and also allows you to copy really large files in in only a couple of seconds. Why? Well, to understand why APFS and HDDs are not well suited, I first need to explain one of the key features of APFS: “copy on write”. After 16 months of using and testing APFS- Apple’s new file system-I’ve come to the conclusion that you probably don’t want to use it on HDDs (disks with rotating platters).
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