Speed up your hard disk by partitioning it so that its innermost 20% remains unused. Reserve space for the SLC write cache on an SSD by limiting the size of volumes.
hard disk
Deciding which file system to use for hard disks can be difficult. Here are the advantages and disadvantages explained in detail, for HFS+ and APFS.
As Mac hard disks grew larger, fragmentation of file data, file system metadata and free space slowed the disk down. Here’s how we used to solve that.
How much faster should a Thunderbolt 3 SSD be for making Time Machine backups? How can you speed up backups to your NAS? Here are representative speeds from real testing.
Classic TM backed up HFS+ to HFS+; current TM backs up APFS to APFS. But what if you want to back up a mixture of APFS and HFS+ volumes?
Apple silicon Macs are designed and built for reliability. Using old techniques to safeguard from disaster isn’t wise: they need to be reappraised, and contingencies planned accordingly.
Overall summary of a year’s testing external hard disks and SSDs ranging in cost from $50 to more than $200 per TB. Which is best?
Two reasons for paying more and using SSDs are that they’re faster and more reliable. Data on failure and reliability don’t appear as clear as the ads, though.
With the right enclosure, a Samsung 980 PRO NVMe SSD delivers transfer speeds of around 2.8 GB/s. Does that make booting from it any faster, compared with an SSD at half the speed?
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.
The Eclectic Light Company 