hoakley September 7, 2017 Macs, Technology

High Sierra release is flawed for many users

In the last couple of days, Apple has revealed that the High Sierra installer will not convert its very popular Fusion Drives to the new APFS file system – yet.

In a note aimed at system administrators, Apple makes clear that the High Sierra installer will automatically convert startup volumes on SSDs to APFS, and that they “can’t opt out of the transition to APFS”. However, it also states crisply that “Fusion Drives and hard disk drives (HDDs) aren’t converted”.

Even more puzzling is the statement that Macs running Sierra will be unable to mount and read volumes which have been converted to or formatted as APFS: “For example, a USB storage device formatted as APFS can be read by a Mac using High Sierra, but not by a Mac using Sierra or earlier.”

Currently, Sierra can do so, using bundled beta-release APFS support. This implies that the release version of APFS in High Sierra is incompatible with the version included in Sierra 10.12.6, and that Apple doesn’t intend offering any update to Sierra which will enable compatibility.

If this note remains accurate, it represents two major blunders in the introduction of High Sierra and APFS.

First, there seems very little point in any Mac with a Fusion Drive (or hard disk) being upgraded to High Sierra. APFS is High Sierra’s big new feature, and without it the upgrade seems nugatory.

Second, anyone using a mix of Macs running Sierra and High Sierra will be wisest not to use APFS on removable drives, as the systems still running Sierra will be unable to access anything on them. For many organisations, that will make High Sierra inadvisable until all Macs can be upgraded to it.

I cannot understand why Apple wants to make High Sierra so unattractive at this late stage. Failure to offer APFS on Fusion Drives and hard disks indicates that High Sierra is being released before it is ready for much of the desktop Mac market. During the summer Apple recognised that APFS was not yet ready for use on hard disks, but has pressed ahead with its release regardless.

High Sierra looks like being Apple’s least popular major upgrade to macOS/OS X/Mac OS X, and could turn out to be an embarrassing failure.

I have now updated my advice on when to update to High Sierra in the light of this disastrous news.

15Comments

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1

Alex on September 7, 2017 at 8:06 pm

I’m running High Sierra [10.13 Beta (17A360a)] on a 27″ iMac with a 128GB/3TB APFS fusion drive. I’ve been running on this since High Sierra beta came out. I didn’t do anything special – just allowed it to convert the drive. Maybe because I did this early on in the beta cycle, this worked. Haven’t had any problems so far. The fusion drive shows up properly with Disk Utility. Backups also work fine – I know because I did a complete system restore not too long ago due to incremental software update messing up video displaying.

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- 2
  
  hoakley on September 7, 2017 at 8:10 pm
  
  Thank you for that info.
  I can only go on what Apple tells us: I know that its APFS engineers were having problems with hard drive performance, which they had hoped to solve by now. Perhaps experience during beta-testing has forced them to change their plan, but that note states very clearly that Fusion Drives and hard disks are not yet converted to APFS in the initial release.
  I wonder if it might be possible to format a Fusion Drive to APFS prior to the install, but suspect that few upgraders would want to do that!
  Howard.
  
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3

Ashley Karyl on September 8, 2017 at 9:29 am

I find myself in a bit of a dilemma over this one, because I generally like to upgrade the OS and in some regards High Sierra is looking like it should be the new Snow Leopard. Over the longterm I think APFS will be a necessary progression, just like OS X took over the old Mac system.

My main computer is a Mac Pro that boots off a PCI based SSD, so there would be zero choice over using APFS. On the other other hand I have four internal SATA drives and an old iMac stuck on El Capitan that occasionally does some work, so it would be a pain if APFS made that difficult, even for simple networking. I gather some apps are also having real problems with APFS and I was reading yesterday that there is remarkably little data available for developers.

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  hoakley on September 8, 2017 at 9:36 am
  
  Like a great many Mac users – even those who are now buying the latest 2017 iMacs with Fusion Drives – there seems little to make High Sierra a wise upgrade yet. Maybe when APFS is fully ready for release, but even then backward compatibility issues are going to remain a problem.
  I haven’t mentioned the problems which Apple reveals with Boot Camp, either. Apparently, for the time being, Boot Camp systems are unable to access the APFS partition when booted in the non-Mac operating system. As I don’t use Boot Camp, I’m not sure of the impact of that, but if I did I’d be wanting to create a third partition in HFS+ to maintain some access to both systems.
  The bottom line is that APFS is not yet ready for general use on Macs.
  Howard.
  
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  - 5
    
    Ashley Karyl on September 8, 2017 at 9:51 am
    
    I hadn’t even thought about Bootcamp and you raise a good point. I have a SATA drive with Windows 10 installed that I occasionally pull out of a drawer to test something on Windows. If this really becomes a problem I may as well wipe that drive and pick up a cheap Windows laptop.
    
    Apple can be pretty ruthless about driving forward with new ideas and they are rarely afraid of rendering something obsolete, but with something as fundamental as the file system, I would have to hope common sense will emerge and they’ll have some solutions before the official release. No doubt some 3rd party utility apps will emerge as well.
    
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      hoakley on September 8, 2017 at 9:56 am
      
      I don’t think that there is much chance of any change before High Sierra’s release: Apple’s note is not about beta-releases, but advises sysadmins about the final release and its limitations. There seem to have been persistent problems with the beta-releases and Fusion Drives, which are not going to be sorted in a couple of days.
      I suspect that we will be waiting for 10.13.1 or later before these issues are addressed, and who knows if or when Apple will provide APFS support in Sierra.
      Howard.
      
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7

robdbirch on September 8, 2017 at 3:42 pm

Couldn’t access to an APFS system be done via NFS or SMB from a system other than High Sierra? If SMB and NFS doesn’t work that is really messed up.

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  hoakley on September 8, 2017 at 3:48 pm
  
  Yes, according to Apple access by both SMB and NFS are supported.
  That doesn’t solve the problem of Target mode, which is of course a superb get-out system for laptops. And it’s not something that you’d want to have to do every time you wanted to access a removable SSD or Flash drive.
  It’s also worth noting in passing that AFP is no longer supported for Time Machine backups to NAS (in Sierra it is merely deprecated).
  Howard.
  
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9

Mike on September 9, 2017 at 9:53 pm

Saves me wasting time even updating any of my Macs other than a Air that I haven’t updated since before Sierra to see what the new APFS is like but all my other macs will be left with HPS+.

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10

Thomas Tempelmann on September 13, 2017 at 6:56 pm

Having done extensive analysis of the on-disk format structures of APFS, I suspect that it’s not a question of when, but it’s simply that the format is rather inefficient on HDs because it may lead to more seeking (OTOH, it contains more redundant data, which is nice). At least, that’s my hypothesis – I haven’t actually verified this in real-world testing. But if that’s true, then you’d not really want to format your HDs in APFS unless you do not care about the slower access speed. Though, if you only use it to store relatively few, large files, this might not be an issue at all. Also, mind you – you CAN format your HDs in APFS format. I use some old 2.5 from my old Macbooks for testing APFS here all the time 🙂

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  hoakley on September 13, 2017 at 7:05 pm
  
  Thank you for that information.
  Apple said at WWDC (or afterwards) that its engineers were still optimising its performance on HDs, so that much is not a surprise. But even late betas seem to have had a lot of problems on Fusion Drives.
  Given the number of Fusion Drives which Apple has sold, and is still selling, it would be a very serious issue if APFS were not to come to them and replace the sticking plaster of CoreStorage.
  Here, I have an iMac17,1 with a 2 TB Fusion Drive, and an old 2011 MacBook Air. The latter can convert to APFS during the install, but its hardware is far too old to benefit much from the rest of High Sierra. The only users who are all able to use High Sierra fully are those who have 2016 or 2017 MacBook Pros (and MacBooks). There are a lot of users in similar situations, who would feel very angry if Apple were not to offer a complete solution. I certainly would.
  Howard.
  
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12

Thomas Tempelmann on September 13, 2017 at 6:58 pm

Oh, and I also like to mentioned that I’m currently writing an app that will allow users to read (not write, for now) APFS formatted disks anywhere – on older Macs, even on Windows and Linux.

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- 13
  
  hoakley on September 13, 2017 at 7:06 pm
  
  Wow! I can see that being an instant success, and wish you well with it.
  Howard.
  
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14

Tony on September 14, 2017 at 10:03 pm

The whole APFS story feels naive to me. First we had the ‘file names are just a bunch of bytes’ claim on iOS until the reality of Unicode bit. That ended with a rational solution in iOS 11 but iOS 10 users hung out to dry unless app developers include workarounds just for iOS 10.

Now we have the new, fast, scalable, universal filing system being too slow on HDDs and not working at all on Fusion Drives. And that’s after changes significant enough that all drives formatted using the betas are unreadable.

The iOS story read a little of cloistered FS designers ignoring the messy realities of Unicode file names since it spoiled their nice clean APIs. Now they seem set to release a universal FS that doesn’t work on, for example, every iMac in existence. Had they not designed for rotating mass storage?

The truth, probably, is that the whole thing has just been rushed. Kudos for making the iOS transition go smoothly (for those of us using Western languages anyway) but this does not inspire me to rush to adopt APFS on my MBP. As one of the favoured group able to use it, I feel uncomfortably exposed to the risks of limited testing and possible fallout from changes to get the rest of the world working (to spell it out, if the HDD seek issue requires a change to APFS formats then all the previous testing goes for a ball of chalk and those that have already migrated end up as beta testers with no way back to good old HFS+).

Ironically, I am less inclined to criticise the lack of an APFS update for Sierra since, AIUI, all machines running Sierra can be updated to High Sierra (well, once APFS supports their backing storage they can).

There is a story about the first MobileMe release: Mr Jobs gathered the team and asked what MobileMe was supposed to do; on being told, he allegedly asked “So why the f— doesn’t it do that?” [Isaacson p531]. Do you suppose that Mr Cook has met with the APFS team yet?

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  hoakley on September 14, 2017 at 10:08 pm
  
  Thanks – I think that you have, as usual, hit the nail on the head.
  The problem with Sierra incompatibility only results from the difficult position the current mess will put users in. For a business or school, upgrading is going to be all or none, as mixing Sierra with High Sierra will court problems.
  Yet those who current mix Sierra with El Cap systems don’t have major issues like that to deal with, do they?
  Howard.
  
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