APFS or Extended Journaled for session drive?

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Hi,

my system drive is an SSD and my audio/video drives are encrypted APFS spinner drives. (more unintentionally as I didn't pay attention when re-formatting them freshly and just focused on the encryption). I have found no difference in my rig's behaviour whatsoever. Been running massive film post projects on it. Usually maxed out voice count and ten thousands of clips on board.

Frank.

I thought APFS wasn't possible on a spinner at least from what I've read when I went to High Sierra.

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

There are many threads all over the Web about slow boot issues with APFS, and how to address that, including fixes from Apple in later Mojave versions.

What is going on during all this time? What do logs show? What known fixes have you tried?

Slow initialization/POST is a separate issue, presumably you know this is really an APFS issue.

I'm not finding my ssd on a pcie card any slower with APFS and High Sierra then when I has Sierra and the drive was formatted the old Apple format. I'm talking from when I hear the startup pong and to a usable desktop. And initialization/POST times went back to as speedy as before the OSX change after I zapped the nvram/pram. Overall from pushing the power button to usable desktop the times are the same for both Sierra and High Sierra.

edit for additional:
I Googled 'slow boot times in APFS' and did find some older stuff like from 2017/2018 and using early versions of High Sierra. What isn't clear in some of the posts is whether people are talking about times from when they push the power button to usable desktop or from the startup chime/pong to usable desktop.

All I can say is what I had happen here. For quite a while up until late last year I was running OSX 10.12.6 on a 1TB Samsung 850 EVO on a pcie adapter card from OWC in the slot next to my cheesegrater's video card. Time from push power button to usable desktop was about 40 seconds and from pong to usable desktop was about 15 seconds (trim enabled). When I changed from Sierra to OSX 10.13.6 my times skyrocketed to double the previous times UNTIL I zapped the nvram/pram. The times went back down to about 35 seconds total and 14/15 seconds from pong to usable desktop.

So for me at least APFS even go a little faster than HFS. Note that these are cold boot times and a warm boot is slightly faster in the initialization/POST phase.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by musicman691

I thought APFS wasn't possible on a spinner at least from what I've read when I went to High Sierra.

Don't think so. Works fine here. Even converting a multi-Terrabyte-drive from HFS+ to APFS only takes a minute or two.

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Don't think so. Works fine here. Even converting a multi-Terrabyte-drive from HFS+ to APFS only takes a minute or two.

APFS sure will work on HDD, it should provide better robustness that HFS+, better encryption (not relevant to most users here... but if you need to rely on filesystem encryption I would get on APFS with macOS updates/APFS security fixes applied), and other stuff. But it does come with a potential performance disadvantage on HDD. Being initially designed for NAND flash SSD, it uses a log based write scheme that avoids updating data in-place. That works *great* on SSDs but can cause extra IO on HDD if files have been modified/edited. And it gets worse as more changes get written to a file.

Here Frank may not be doing extensive edits on the content on video and audio files on those HDD. (just editing a session containing those files is not necessarily modifying/writing changes to the video files)... and besides Pro Tools disk cache hides so many IO issues. APFS on those drives provide extra robustness over HFS+ but if stuff is not getting changed on much on thise drives you may not need that, so kinda a catch 22. Personally I might also want to use APFS on a HDD if I had to for other features it provides even if it degraded performance, like snapshots or shared free space.

There is no automatic correct answer here, do what works for you... well except if you are using SSD then you really want to be on APFS on recent macOS versions, and maybe if on HDD you want to move to SSD and APFS if it is affordable and you want extra performance.

Again lots of stuff related to APFS is discussed all over the Web.

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Worrying about boot time "problems" for NVMe or APFS seems silly, if that is an issues then again I suspect something is setup wrong/known issues/old bugs have not been taken care of. Again all well discussed on line... which makes me wish that folks would list exactly which of those known issues they have worked around/applied fixed for excluded before posting here.

[Righty27]

Further to Darryl’s (typically!) well-informed comments on the use of APFS on HDDs/spinners, whilst most advice is to stick with HFS+ for HDDs, I suspect this is mainly to protect less-informed users and avoid issues in case the new filesystem is used inappropriately.

As Darryl mentions, the main use-case to avoid APFS is when working with lots of edited files, such as when using a DAW/Pro Tools or an NLE/Final Cut Pro, for example. In this scenario, performance can be expected to degrade as the number of edits/files increases. Another absolute non-starter is Time Machine - these must continue to use HFS+.

However, for backups such as clones made with CCC, where typically a changed file on the destination drive is deleted and replaced with a new copy, the helpful support at Bombich (CCC developer) recommended APFS when I was restructuring my backups recently, as the ‘pros’ (flexible partitions are great to backup multiple Macs to a single drive and other APFS improvements designed for reliability even if not an SSD, still apply) in this case outweigh the ‘cons’.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by Darryl Ramm

Here Frank may not be doing extensive edits on the content on video and audio files on those HDD. (just editing a session containing those files is not necessarily modifying/writing changes to the video files)

Hm, any edit in PT is just a playback instruction. Play sample XYZ from file XYZ at TC XYZ for XYZ samples.

No edit in PT actually modifies the audio (or video) on disk.

But maybe I'm misunderstanding...

I can't imagine a field with more edits on video and audio than film post. Especially in super-sessions containing 2-3 generations of 6-reel films.

However, I've been (unwittingly) working with APFS for 2 films now with no difference in performance. It's neither better nor worse.

Heck on a 5.1 mac you don't even notice a difference in performance between SSD and HDD with ProTools. Tried all that. It's all really paper specs.
Might be different on 6,1 upwards but irrelevant on a 12-core cheesegrater. This "wisdom" has saved me so much money on SSD cost. Every project needs a 4TB drive nowadays. SSD is (still) too expensive to be treated like expendables.

Again all my totally subjective impressions... take them with a grain of salt.

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

No edit in PT actually modifies the audio (or video) on disk.

True. Even the "destrcuctive" audiosuite processing creates a new file. Or consolidate. Nothing modifies the old file, which you can of course get rid of once it becomes unnecessary (though I never do that)

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Heck on a 5.1 mac you don't even notice a difference in performance between SSD and HDD with ProTools. Tried all that. It's all really paper specs.
Might be different on 6,1 upwards but irrelevant on a 12-core cheesegrater. This "wisdom" has saved me so much money on SSD cost. Every project needs a 4TB drive nowadays. SSD is (still) too expensive to be treated like expendables.

Again all my totally subjective impressions... take them with a grain of salt.

Beg to differ with a very large grain of sodium chloride. The 2012 5,1 cheesegrater I'm currently running originally came with a 7200 rpm spinner system drive (refurb Mac from OWC). After a few months of working with that setup I changed the system drive to a Samsung 850 EVO in a drive bay. A very sizable jump in performance (faster) was evident over what the spinner was capable of. When I moved that ssd to a pcie card performance took another jump to the good. Same thing when I moved my samples off a 7200 rpm spinner in a drive bay to a 2 TB Samsung 860 EVO on another pcie adapter card.

A Samsung 860 EVO 4 TB size is $580 US from B&H. That's not too bad a price to be honest.

For archival I'd say spinners all the way. For everything else - ssd.

[Frank Kruse]

Originally Posted by musicman691

Beg to differ with a very large grain of sodium chloride. The 2012 5,1 cheesegrater I'm currently running originally came with a 7200 rpm spinner system drive (refurb Mac from OWC). After a few months of working with that setup I changed the system drive to a Samsung 850 EVO in a drive bay. A very sizable jump in performance (faster) was evident over what the spinner was capable of. When I moved that ssd to a pcie card performance took another jump to the good. Same thing when I moved my samples off a 7200 rpm spinner in a drive bay to a 2 TB Samsung 860 EVO on another pcie adapter card.

A Samsung 860 EVO 4 TB size is $580 US from B&H. That's not too bad a price to be honest.

For archival I'd say spinners all the way. For everything else - ssd.

Yep, agree for the system drive, which is an SSD here too. That definitely speeds up boot time etc and can be very small.

Over here an 860 EVO pro 4TB is around 1000€. A 4TB WD Black is 200€. Times three bays that's a massive difference per drive bay: 2400€ total.

I'm sure they perform great in a machine with a more capable interfaces. So far what I've seen here wasn't worth the investment...

[Darryl Ramm]

Originally Posted by Frank Kruse

Hm, any edit in PT is just a playback instruction. Play sample XYZ from file XYZ at TC XYZ for XYZ samples.

No edit in PT actually modifies the audio (or video) on disk.

which is also basically what I just said... but we do not know what other processing, manipulation you may be doing to files. I expect this to not be an issue for most users. It can be an issue for things like older designed databases, and sometimes databases get embedded in software your would never expect. I just want users to be aware that it may be possible to run into cases of pathological performance with APFS on HDD...

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I am not sure what the argument going on is here...

As for performance, if a system is working for any user then great. And your work with high-end video is very different than others working audio. One great way to decrease performance is make unneeded changes and get nothing working

Throwing backwards and forwards arguments about "SSDs" may be kinda meaningless. Starting with different SSD performance in a legacy cheese grater can differ by about an order of magnitude. Are you talking old SATA II SSD, or modern PCIe 3/NVMe drives on a PCIe 2 to 3 card. And what file system? And what dimension are you guys even basing some judgement on... session startup/disk cache load time? session save time? VI sample/load time? VI sample/streaming performance? to operate reliably with auto save? system boot time? system clone/backup/recovery time? Is your Pro Tools performance actually CPU bound? or limited by something else? ... so many dimensions here.

At~$150-$300/TB for even NVMe SSD (plus a switch card in legacy cheese graters) I would expect they do fall into easy upgrade choices for many users *if* they give a performance benefit for that user ... and if they they have free PCIe slots in legacy cheese graters. Boot/system drives, ideally NVMe, I always expect users to see a benefit from, with "snappier" overall systems performance, faster Pro Tools startup, VI load times (if memory cached samples are on the boot drive), and faster boot (modulo a few known/hopefully avoidable problems). For many folks not working with video or very large VI libraries, a single NVMe SSD may be lower cost than other options because they can get everything on one very fast drive.