Article above states: "Format: APFS or macOS Extended (Journaled) *as recommended* by Disk Utility"

chaseholden wrote:

For clarification, when you say "check the proposed format" do you mean the first option in the Disk Utility format popup menu after I pressed Initialize button for my mechanical spinning hard disk drive?

Yes! That is Disk Utility's recommendation... although I would still recommend Mac OS Extended (Journaled) instead.

Apple themselves explicitly mentioned that APFS is optimized for SSDs (and by implication, not optimized for rotational hard drives). The creator of Carbon Copy Cloner (Mike Bombich) has a blog post on testing the differences between the two file formats: https://bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apfs-enumeration-performance-on-rotational-hard-drives

Hope this helps!

Hi chaseholden,

To see if Disk Utility has a recommendation for the drive, click Erase, then check the proposed format.

If you're NOT using the disk for Time Machine, I recommend formatting the external hard drive as Mac OS Extended (Journaled). It is designed for rotational hard drives and makes it faster to find files since metadata is stored in a known location on disk, improving read and write speeds significantly. Until macOS Big Sur, it offered encryption as well.

In contrast, APFS stores file metadata alongside each file. When your Mac wants to read a file, it has to first locate this metadata (which could be anywhere on the disk). This extra searching (seek) has a performance penalty on rotational hard drives, but not on SSDs.

If you want the external drive to be accessible to both Macs and other PCs, you should format the drive as ExFAT.

TL;DR:

• Use Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for rotational hard drives.

• Use APFS on SSDs, or if you need volume encryption in macOS Big Sur or later.

• Use ExFAT if you want both Macs and Windows PCs to be able to access the drive.

If it is a spinning Hard Drive, you should probably use MacOS Extended (Journaled).

I haven't erased enough drives to see what it offers, but you need to at least get a GUID Partition Map onto that drive.

If you Click Erase and set the Partition Map to GUID, does it pick on of the formats for you?

Barney, the article clearly states "as recommended" and I'm looking for answer from an Apple rep what that means.

Then you should probably call an “Apple rep.” None of the volunteers here can speak for Apple. You should have called AppleCare.

Could “recommend” mean anything other than, “state explicitly?” There is nothing in Disk Utility nor the Guide that explicitly states what format to choose.

"you should probably" is not helpful advice nor is any random speculation without a reference or rationale just to score some points.

You might want to read the terms of use and the awards and levels information because you have demonstrated a complete lack of understanding of who participates here and how points are awarded.

To format as the Time-Machine Backup Disk, Open Time Machine Preferences in System Preferences. - Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support