Will HFS+ Damage SSDs?

[Alvin777]

Hello Mac friends,

Will using HFS+ damage SSDs (understanding that APFS was made of SSDs and HFS+ is for hardisks, for mechanical drives)? This is for Time Machine (speed is not a priority). If HFS+ won't damage the SSD, I'm switching from APFS to HFS+ hoping I won't get the 'not enough space' again even though both my Time Machine and macOS SSDs have the same capacity of 1TB (it may be a macOS bug- not sure).

Thank you in advance.

 

[Bigwaff]

Time Machine in Sonoma requires APFS. You’ll be prompted to reformat if the disk isn’t already formatted APFS. The only way to use HFS+ with TM is if you have an existing HFS+ disk with an existing TM back up on it.

 

[casperes1996]

HFS+ does not damage SSDs. It works just fine. However, as Bigwaff says, there are other limitations at play for using HFS+ these days. It's a legacy filesystem at this point.

As for not enough space, TimeMachine makes incremental backups all the time. It makes sense for it to take up *more space* than the machine you back up as it tries to keep several versions of everything as far back as it can.

 

[Fishrrman]

I continue to use HFS+ on ALL my drives (HDDs and SSDs), UNLESS the drive is REQUIRED to be in APFS (such as an internal boot drive).

HFS+ drives are still "reach-able" using 3rd party drive utilities.

APFS drives are not (no 3rd party utilities seem to be able to "touch them", as Apple has kept some of the specs proprietary).

 

[casperes1996]

I continue to use HFS+ on ALL my drives (HDDs and SSDs), UNLESS the drive is REQUIRED to be in APFS (such as an internal boot drive).

HFS+ drives are still "reach-able" using 3rd party drive utilities.

APFS drives are not (no 3rd party utilities seem to be able to "touch them", as Apple has kept some of the specs proprietary).

I mean, just a very quick search, reveals as hit 1 on Google, that Paragon does have an APFS product for 'touching' APFS from Windows

APFS for Windows | Paragon Software

Read and write APFS-formatted HDD, SSD or flash drive on Windows computer.

www.paragon-software.com

There's also plenty of open source Mac software that interacts with APFS

 

[Fishrrman]

casperes wrote:
"There's also plenty of open source Mac software that interacts with APF"

Can you name one or two that can repair or defrag APFS volumes?

 

[Bigwaff]

Can you name one or two that can repair or defrag APFS volumes?

SSD don’t need to be defrag (and should not be) … and now it’s down to “repair”, and you make good point. There aren’t any other than Apple’s CLI tools (which Disk Utility calls under the hood). Any GUI app purporting to “repair” APFS volumes, whether it be commercial or free, is probably doing the same… delegating to Apple’s tools under its hood.

 

[casperes1996]

casperes wrote:
"There's also plenty of open source Mac software that interacts with APF"

Can you name one or two that can repair or defrag APFS volumes?

A Bigwaff says, defragging SSDs is not recommended. Diskutil does allow you to enable defragmentation of APFS, but I'm not sure if it actually performs it on SSDs or only HDDs.

As for repair, I can't speak to rebuilding volume maps and such, but if you just want files off of a corrupted APFS disk there are third party utilities, not relying on diskutil. Take a look at this article wherein one of these tools is used to mount an APFS Volume the system doesn't recognise

APFS Object Map Recovery (free)

More data recovery options for APFS:

GitHub - jivanpal/drat: Utility for performing data recovery and analysis of APFS partitions/containers.

Utility for performing data recovery and analysis of APFS partitions/containers. - jivanpal/drat

github.com

https://github.com/cugu/afro // Outdated

Or the Linux tools

GitHub - linux-apfs/linux-apfs-rw: APFS module for linux, with experimental write support

APFS module for linux, with experimental write support - linux-apfs/linux-apfs-rw

github.com

 

[Fishrrman]

casperes

The "tools" you list in reply 8 above are pretty much "beyond the reach" of an average user.

Let me know when we see apps like "TechTool", "Drive Genius", etc., come online that can perform the same operations with APFS as they do with HFS+.

Also, it's STILL possible to use drive utilities on HFS+ drives, running under the latest OS's (assuming they'll still run).

Example:
I can run an older version of "iDefrag" on my MacBook Pro 14" using Sonoma -- "aimed" at HFS+ drives (not SSDs).
Still works.

 

[casperes1996]

casperes

The "tools" you list in reply 8 above are pretty much "beyond the reach" of an average user.

Let me know when we see apps like "TechTool", "Drive Genius", etc., come online that can perform the same operations with APFS as they do with HFS+.

Also, it's STILL possible to use drive utilities on HFS+ drives, running under the latest OS's (assuming they'll still run).

Example:
I can run an older version of "iDefrag" on my MacBook Pro 14" using Sonoma -- "aimed" at HFS+ drives (not SSDs).
Still works.

Sorry I may have misunderstood the issue at hand. I thought the discussion was “is it at all possible for expert users to manipulate apfs drives”. Not whether there are streamlined, user friendly utilities for it.

In that case I question what an average user needs outside of Fisk utility but I’m sure there are use cases. And of course hfs+ still works and you can use a manipulate the drives like before. But there are limitations. Like installing macOS directly to the drive