2014 Mac Mini SD card slot

I replaced the internal HD with an SSD several years ago and rather than take it apart again to install a larger drive, I plan on using an SD card to store about 200GB of music for use with the Apple Music application and Big Sur. My question is about formatting the card. I have been formatting my external USB3 and Thunderbolt solid state drives using APFS for use with Macs and ExFat when I want a drive to be compatible with Windows. I have used HFS+ to format SD cards in the Mini before when using them as auxiliary storage, since there was no need for Windows compatibility. I was just wondering if it is possible or desirable to use APFS to format the SD card, since it is a solid state storage device. Since I will be writing new music to the card infrequently and mainly using it to play music from my existing library, speed is not really an issue. It just seems better to use a native Apple format for this application.

Mac mini, macOS 11.0

Posted on Dec 6, 2020 3:17 PM

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Posted on Dec 6, 2020 3:35 PM

I don't see any reason why it will not work. My only concern, would be that an SD card is not as reliable as a good quality external hard drive. You do not need APFS, personally I would just format it GUID Partition Map / Mac OS Extended (Journaled) like any other external storage drive.

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2014 Mac Mini SD card slot

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