Format External SSD w/APFS
Shortly after upgrading my Mac mini 2018 to Catalina I received a new Sabrent Rocket Pro 2TB NVMe External SSD. I had communicated with another user of this drive who used it with Catalina and had excellent performance, some of which he attributed to formatting it with APFS.
As received the drive came with ExFAT, and seemed to work fine attached via USB-C, though I decided before coping large amounts of data to it, I would reformat with APFS. However when I opened the Disk Utility and attempted to "Erase", APFS was not offered as a choice.
In reading the requirements and recommendations for APFS it seemed it was appropriate for an SSD, internal or external, as long as it was being used with High Sierra 10.13 or later (this will be the case). In searching, I found a thread about changing the Disk Utility View to "All Devices", I did that and tried both the 'Physical Disk' and 'Physical Volume' with the same results, APFS is not offered.
Is there anything I'm missing regarding how to format this drive with APFS? Is there some physical compatibility that it may be missing (which would be odd given the other user's experience)?
Thanks for your consideration
These images show the Disk Utility selections for both Disk and Volume:
Mac mini 2018 or later