reformatting external drive

[Jonathan Brady]

Hi.

I am considering buying this external drive -

WD 10 TB Elements Desktop External Hard Drive - USB 3.0, Black
by Amazon
Learn more: https://smile.amazon.co.uk/dp/B07G364YHX/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_AYE0GE8CCFVACFAGXV3C

Would I be correct in thinking I can format it for Mac using disk utility? Would that be the case for all external drives that come formatted for Windows?

Thanks,

Jonathan

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

That’s right yes, you can format any USB drive for Mac. Format it with the GUID partition scheme (not Master Block Record MBR as that’s for PCs) and use the macOS Extended (Journaled) format.

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Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

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[Jason Davies]

Curious about why not AFPS? Is there a particular reason?

cheers,
Jason

On 4 Mar 2021, at 10:24, Sam - MacAmbulance wrote:

> That’s right yes, you can format any USB drive for Mac. Format it
> with the GUID partition scheme (not Master Block Record MBR as
> that’s for PCs) and use the macOS Extended (Journaled) format.

Cheers,

Jason

[Tony Crooks]

Jason asked the question going through my mind. Going forward or going back?

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Tony Crooks
tcr...@gmail.com
+44 7428 706227

[Sam - MacAmbulance]

APFS performance on spinning disk drives is abysmal, it only works well on SSDs (not even fusion drives as they have a spinning disk component).

That’s why Macs with spinning disks and fusion drives on Mojave or later slow down, replace the hard drive with SSD and you get a sudden massive speed increase.

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Regards Sam Mullen +44 (0)7747778022 in...@macambulance.com www.macambulance.com MacAmbulance Ltd. Providing Affordable Mac/PC Support and Web Development

MacAmbulance Ltd. is a registered company in England & Wales, registration number 8466597 This email is intended solely for the addressed recipients and may contain privileged or confidential information. If you have received this email in error please notify the sender and delete the email immediately.

On 4 Mar 2021, at 11:36, 'Jason Davies' via Sussex Mac User Group <sm...@googlegroups.com> wrote:

Curious about why not AFPS? Is there a particular reason?

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[Jason Davies]

ah, that's helpful thanks. I think I have a spinning drive with AFPS but only for Time Machine, as people said it was faster - I guess it's swings and roundabouts!

cheers,
J

To view this discussion on the web, visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/smug/3A372476-3EE1-46E2-80B3-19510E4C8799%40macambulance.com.

Cheers,

Jason

[Tony Crooks]

My own observations of Time Machine on a M1 Mac is that it is much faster than before. Watching this I felt sure that APFS was a factor in reducing time for the backup - something to do with containers?

[Jason Davies]

Is it from an SSD or a spinning disk, though?

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Cheers,

Jason

[Tony Crooks]

Actually a spinning disk. Overall twice as fast  but some of that comes from the M1 performance and fast storage on the silicon in preparing the snapshot. I’ve done a lot of copying of photo albums & videos to spinning disks of late - about 9000 images and 200 videos - for each of our family members and much reduced copy times over the non-M1 predecessor.

[Stephen Watson]

Just my 2p worth but on our good old hard disk, reformatting our drive as APFS definitely speeded up the Time Machine backup.

It may be that in normal use, APFS is slower on a real disk, but some of the ‘kludges’ that were part of what TM did may no longer be required on APFS and with other changes to do with snapshots and the rest may more than counterbalance the slowing down.

Maybe. 🤔 

Stephen 

You meet your destiny on the road you take to avoid it. ~ Carl Jung

On 4 Mar 2021, at 14:04, Tony Crooks <tcr...@gmail.com> wrote:



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