It depends whether you’re going to boot macOS from it, on the space required for snapshots, and how large they could become. And there’s more.
APFS
File data stored towards the periphery of the disk is read and written nearly twice as fast as that near the centre. How to take advantage of this.
Which is faster with a hard disk: using APFS or sticking with HFS+? Are there any differences in their performance on SSDs?
Provided in Archive Utility and three command tools, its LZFSE compression even supports APFS special files like clones and sparse files.
Internal or external? Hard disk or SSD? USB or Thunderbolt? Cooled or compact? Branded or separates? An external boot disk? Do you have a return and refund option?
What’s the Update volume doing weeks after the last macOS update? What can I do if ejecting my Time Machine backup storage causes an improper ejection error?
We’ve recently discovered a macOS service for ‘trials’ which runs ‘experiments’. Why hasn’t Apple told us, and explained its implications for our privacy?
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
All disks cache data to be written, which makes benchmarking them tricky. It has more serious consequences which macOS tries to allow for in file systems and backups.
Why Time Machine makes snapshots, and how they can grow and apparently consume free space. What you can and should do to manage this.
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