Apple's Federighi promises APFS boot support for Mac Fusion Drives 'very soon'
Apple will have news on APFS for the Fusion Drives in Macs "very soon," according to the company's software engineering head, Craig Federighi.
Fusion Drives combine conventional hard disks with a limited amount of flash storage, offering some of the benefits of both without the cost of a full-fledged SSD. The APFS file system was introduced alongside macOS High Sierra last year, and is optimized for flash storage, but Apple quickly revealed that Fusion Drives wouldn't be converted or be able to be used as boot drives.
"We intend to address this question very soon," Federighi said in an email exchange with a MacRumors reader.
Federighi's email is the first time that anyone inside Apple has addressed the issue.
APFS was first launched in beta for storage drives only shortly after the 2016 WWDC. Apple started the migration to APFS in devices with iOS 10.3.
Since Fusion Drive compatibility is missing in the macOS 10.13.5 beta, the executive's comments likely mean that Apple will announce support during WWDC 2018, scheduled to kick off June 4. That in turn would probably imply inclusion with this fall's macOS 10.14, given that the company rarely uses WWDC to talk about interim software updates.
APFS has become de facto on every Apple platform with flash storage, including not just Macs but iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and even the Apple Watch. Support for Fusion drives was included with early versions of the High Sierra beta for some models of Apple's fusion drive, but was completely stripped out during the testing process.
The format is a modern replacement for for the decades-old HFS+, with better efficiency, resiliency, and encryption, as well as easier backups.
Fusion Drives combine conventional hard disks with a limited amount of flash storage, offering some of the benefits of both without the cost of a full-fledged SSD. The APFS file system was introduced alongside macOS High Sierra last year, and is optimized for flash storage, but Apple quickly revealed that Fusion Drives wouldn't be converted or be able to be used as boot drives.
"We intend to address this question very soon," Federighi said in an email exchange with a MacRumors reader.
Federighi's email is the first time that anyone inside Apple has addressed the issue.
APFS was first launched in beta for storage drives only shortly after the 2016 WWDC. Apple started the migration to APFS in devices with iOS 10.3.
Since Fusion Drive compatibility is missing in the macOS 10.13.5 beta, the executive's comments likely mean that Apple will announce support during WWDC 2018, scheduled to kick off June 4. That in turn would probably imply inclusion with this fall's macOS 10.14, given that the company rarely uses WWDC to talk about interim software updates.
APFS has become de facto on every Apple platform with flash storage, including not just Macs but iPhones, iPads, Apple TVs, and even the Apple Watch. Support for Fusion drives was included with early versions of the High Sierra beta for some models of Apple's fusion drive, but was completely stripped out during the testing process.
The format is a modern replacement for for the decades-old HFS+, with better efficiency, resiliency, and encryption, as well as easier backups.
Comments
I've just clarified the language in the story a bit.
Apple's Federighi promises APFS boot support for Mac Fusion Drives 'very soon'
This headline couldn't be more wrong. Federighi said, "We intend to address this question very soon". All it means is that Apple will answer the question. It doesn't mean the answer will be affirmative.In a different context we can read 'address' as 'resolve the issue favourably'.
I would be more optimistic than pessimistic in this case and read that WWDC could be when we get some good news. Even better would be to get a decent Disk Utility back. I only seem to hear complaints about what has been stripped away over the years.
Is there any good long term testing of that out? Or the 2TB?
https://malcont.net/2017/09/apfs-vs-hfs-benchmarks-on-2017-macbook-pro-with-macos-high-sierra/
All spinning platter hard disks fail much more commonly.
If they offer this, there needs to be very detailed full drive testing first as part of the conversion process, and also require a valid within last 7 days time machine backup record.
Nothing wrong with APFS. But having the first 30-128GB of a CoreStorage volume on an SSD can hard hard drive failures for quite awhile, if the drive is slowing but error correction still allowing it to function.
By the way, I've been seriously considering upgrading my Early '11 MBP to an SSD RAID 0, and maybe even selling my iMac and buying a second-hand 2011 model so I can do the same upgrade and both reuse my 32GB of memory (ever since I've upgraded my machine to a 2.93 GHz Core i7, it became compatible with the same, faster 1333 MHz modules the 2011 models come with) and get the dual SATA III 6Gbps channels…
Supporting APFS and FileVault on such a setup would be even cooler than just supporting Fusion Drives; I guess having a boot partition on one SSD, a recovery partition on the other and a common RAID 0 made up of the larger partitions on both drives wouldn't be that different functionally from having a boot partition on an SSD, a recovery partition on a spinning drive and a CoreStorage logical volume spanning the remaining two partitions, so I see no technical reason why Apple wouldn't put in the effort to make it work. AFAIK, I believe it's already possible to get it to work, but you basically have to reformat the RAID and do a clean install of macOS with each point update, which defeats the whole purpose and any speed gains from that setup.
Yeah, I know RAID 0 setups are inherently more fragile (then again, so are Fusion Drives, and a RAID 0 made up of SSDs is probably more durable than the former, especially on a laptop), but I already have Time Machine-, CCC- and cloud-based backups, so… no biggie. And I know that a SATA III SSD RAID 0 will never be as fast as the first-party, native PCI-X RAID-like thing Apple has going on the iMac Pro, but it will still smoke both of my Fusion Drives and breathe three or four more years of life into my machines for a very decent price.