Comparing ApFS and HFS
Developer.apple.com has published a comparison of file systems' volume formats:
Mac OS Extended (HFS+) | Apple File System (ApFS) | |
---|---|---|
Number of allocation blocks | 2 32 (4 billion) | 2 63 (9 quintillion) |
File IDs | 32-bit | 64-bit |
Maximum file size | 2 63 bytes | 2 63 bytes |
Time stamp granularity | 1 second | 1 nanosecond |
Copy-on-write | ||
Crash-protected | journaled | |
File and Directory clones | ||
Snapshots | ||
Space sharing | ||
Native encryption | ||
Sparse files | ||
Fast directory sizing |
On hard drives performance gains will be minimal. We conducted tests with a regular hard drive, here are the results:
FS | READ | WRITE | READ (IOPS) | WRITE (IOPS) |
---|---|---|---|---|
HFS | 85.15 | 85.37 | 81.2 | 81.4 |
ApFS | 85.29 | 85.98 | 81.3 | 82 |
OpenZFS | 58.45 | 28.52 | 56 | 41 |