External Drive APSF vs extended journaled

When using a rotational drive on an SSD MB Pro running Catalina should the partitions on the drive be extended journaled or APSF? Does one "simply" choose disc utility, make 4 partitions in this case and size, name each one and select extended journal or apsf ?

Also, I believe that the drive can have mixed formats? apsf and ext journaled in this case on the same drive?

MacBook

Posted on Jun 15, 2020 9:20 PM

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1 reply

steve626

Level 6

14,499 points

Jun 15, 2020 9:44 PM in response to mrokloricred37

I would suggest using HFS (Mac OS Extended) on rotating (mechanical) drives. APFS is optimized for SSD's, but reviews on using it on mechanical drives are mixed (or even negative). However if you want to boot from the external drive, it must be APSF. Booting Catalina from an external mechanical APFS drive will be very slow, it could take 10 minutes or more. One advantage of using HFS on an external drive is that it can be read from an older computer as well.

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External Drive APSF vs extended journaled

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