Mojave secondary internal HDD use Extended Journal or APFS?

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Mojave secondary internal HDD use Extended Journal or APFS?

Have an iMac running last version of Mojave with a Samsung SSD for the boot drive formatted with APFS. Going to add a secondary internal Western Digital 2T hard drive to it and wanted to know if I should format it as Extended Journal or APFS?

The article below that I read seems to indicate that I should use Extended journal for the hard drive. If I am copying something from the HD to the SSD (or visa versa) does Mojave do some sort on of the fly conversion of the data to the correct format?

https://www.lifewire.com/apfs-on-different-disk-types-4155143

Posted on May 20, 2020 1:19 PM

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Answer 1

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Barney-15E

Level 10

112,962 points

May 20, 2020 1:43 PM in response to mindqust

Files do not care what file system they are stored on. The file system doesn't affect the file at all. There is no conversion as there isn't anything to convert.

Basically, you tell APFS, "store this data," and it stores it in its file system however it wants. If you ask it for the data so that you can store it somewhere else, you get the data back, then ask HFS+ to store the data.

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Answer 2

Kappy

Level 10

361,753 points

May 20, 2020 1:42 PM in response to mindqust

HDDs should always be formatted using HFS+. SSDs can be formatted using APFS with Mojave but no earlier version of macOS, if it will be used for r/w. High Sierra can read an APFS formatted disk but cannot write to one. Thus, it cannot be used as a startup disk.

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Mojave secondary internal HDD use Extended Journal or APFS?

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