
- #DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS HOW TO#
- #DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS MAC OS#
- #DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS UPDATE#
- #DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS ARCHIVE#
- #DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS FULL#
#DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS MAC OS#
To explain how Mac OS Extended and APFS each handle that task, imagine the drive is a factory that builds rockets. Sometimes people want to split a drive into multiple virtual volumes to separate data such as files for work and files for home or to encrypt one for storing sensitive data and leave the other unencrypted. That’s all behind-the-scenes stuff, but what does APFS enable you to do? One of its most powerful user-facing features is how it enables you to create multiple, resizable volumes on your drive. Even if your startup disk is an SSD, your Time Machine drive needs to remain in Mac OS Extended format for the time being. It’s possible to format a hard disk drive as APFS, but you’re likely to experience a performance hit compared to it formatted with Mac OS Extended. It will be interesting to see how Apple addresses that in Mojave.ĪPFS also isn’t supported on Time Machine drives.
#DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS FULL#
APFS currently works only with SSDs, although Apple says that full support for mechanical hard disks and Fusion drives is coming in macOS 10.14 Mojave. That said, Apple is still working on APFS, making it a moving target for developers of backup and disk utility software and limiting the compatibility of the file system. So, underneath the surface, APFS handles data more efficiently. In terms of performance that you can see, duplicating that file-or folder, or hundreds of files-happens nearly instantaneously because APFS makes metadata links to the originals. Also, if you duplicate a file on an SSD, APFS uses the stored data of the original file and writes just the changes rather than writing an entirely new file.

But there’s a catch: data can be written to the cells only a finite number of times, so APFS efficiently shuffles data around to manage SSD wear. On an SSD, data is written to cells regardless of where they are located in relation to one another. In reality, most files are split up into many tiny pieces, which is why we used to optimize performance by “defragmenting” disks, a practice largely unneeded these days except in rare circumstances. It was designed-many years ago-with magnetic disks in mind, where a file is preferably written in a long stretch across the surface. However, the file system in use before APFS, Mac OS Extended, isn’t as efficient when working with SSDs. An SSD also has no moving parts, so the likelihood of mechanical failure is extremely low. (In fact, APFS is the file system used by iOS devices, Apple Watches, and Apple TVs-all of which store data in solid-state memory.) An SSD provides much faster performance because it doesn’t suffer from the lag between macOS asking for data and a mechanical disk’s armature skipping to the correct positions on the platters to read it.


Although mechanical hard disk drives are still widely used and offer the best price per gigabyte, solid-state storage media is the future. Let’s start with why Apple made the switch from Mac OS Extended to APFS in the first place. APFS offers a few notable automatic benefits and some useful things you can do directly. But in the process of writing my just-released book Take Control of Your Digital Storage, I learned why Apple went to all the trouble. High Sierra converted my 2016 MacBook Pro when I upgraded and, since nothing blew up, I filed APFS away as another technology shift that Apple managed efficiently. To find out, open Disk Utility, click your startup disk in the sidebar, and look under the disk name. You may not even have noticed that your Mac is now running APFS. There are any number of ways the switch to APFS could have gone wrong, but for most people the shift was seamless-if a bit more time consuming than most macOS upgrades. The file system is the bedrock-level technology that specifies where data is stored-not just in terms of how files and folders are represented in the operating system, but where individual bits are physically stored in the cells of an SSD chip or on the magnetic surfaces of the spinning platters in a mechanical hard disk drive.
#DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS UPDATE#
Installing the update on a Mac with a solid-state drive (SSD)-but not a Fusion drive-automatically switched the underlying file system from Mac OS Extended (also known as HFS+) to APFS (Apple File System). When Apple released macOS 10.13 High Sierra in 2017, one of its most notable features was nearly invisible.

#DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS HOW TO#
#DISK WARRIOR VS DRIVE GENIUS ARCHIVE#
