ExFAT VS APFS - Which is the fastest Mac disk format using Apple Silicon on a MacBook Pro M1 Max?
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- čas přidán 11. 06. 2024
- ACASIS TBU401 enclosure at Amazon geni.us/u9A5heL
ACASIS TBU405 M1 enclosure with fan Amazon geni.us/ACASIS-TBU405ProM1
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ACASIS TBU401 enclosure at ACASIS website geni.us/Acasis-TBU401
WD SSDs:
SN850X 4TB geni.us/SN850X-4TB
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SN850X 1TB geni.us/SN850X-1TB
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ExFAT VS APFS - Which is the fastest Mac disk format using Apple Silicon on a MacBook Pro M1 Max?
What is the best format for your external drives on Mac, ExFAT or APFS?
So what I'm doing in this video is to format the same external SSD twice to two different file systems. First time using the ExFAT file system and the second time using the APFS file system.
Running the Blackmagic Disk Speed Utility it's clear to see that the APFS file system format is noticeably faster than the ExFAT file system format and considerably faster when writing.
The external drive I'm using is one that I've put together that is using an Acasis USB4.0 enclosure with a WB Black SN850X 4TB NVME M.2 SSD inside of it. This drive is also Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 compatible.
It's worth noting that this USB4.0 external SSD is backward compatible with all USB standards back down to USB2. I tried the drive on an old Dell Optiplex Windows PC on its front USB2 ports and it worked perfectly, as well as the USB3 ports on the rear.
Here's a video showing how to put this drive together, the video also has some extensive speed tests, including real world data transferring.
How to build a fast USB4.0 Thunderbolt external NVME SSD drive for your Apple Mac MacBook Pro M1 Max • How To Build The Faste...
Video Chapters:
00:00 Intro and video explanation
01:11 ExFAT vs APFS speed test
04:44 End summary
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WB Black SN850X 4TB geni.us/v0dr
Acasis USB4.0 Thunderbolt 40Gb/s enclosure geni.us/u9A5heL
MacBook Pro M1 Max geni.us/2F4Vr
Laptop stand used with the MacBook geni.us/4JJd7
ExFAT VS APFS - Which is the fastest Mac disk format using Apple Silicon on a MacBook Pro M1 Max?
What is the best format for your external drives on Mac, ExFAT or APFS?
So what I'm doing in this video is to format the same external SSD twice to two different file systems. First time using the ExFAT file system and the second time using the APFS file system.
Running the Blackmagic Disk Speed Utility it's clear to see that the APFS file system format is noticeably faster than the ExFAT file system format and considerably faster when writing.
The external drive I'm using is one that I've put together that is using an Acasis USB4.0 enclosure with a WB Black SN850X 4TB NVME M.2 SSD inside of it. This drive is also Thunderbolt 3 and Thunderbolt 4 compatible.
It's worth noting that this USB4.0 external SSD is backward compatible with all USB standards back down to USB2. I tried the drive on an old Dell Optiplex Windows PC on its front USB2 ports and it worked perfectly, as well as the USB3 ports on the rear.
Here's a video showing how to put this drive together, the video also has some extensive speed tests, including real world data transferring.
VIDEO SOON......
Video Chapters:
00:00 Intro and video explanation
01:11 ExFAT vs APFS speed test
04:44 End summary
Please give a thumbs up, share, sub & click the bell for notifications.
The stuff I mostly use to produce my videos
Cameras:
Sony FDR-AX100 geni.us/SONY-FDR-AX100
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DJI Action 2 geni.us/DJI_Action-2
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Sennheiser ME64 with K6 geni.us/Sennheiser-K6-And-ME64
Shure SM7B geni.us/SHURE_SM7B
Various RODE Microphones geni.us/Rode-Microphones
Triton Fethead geni.us/Triton-Fethead
Behringer U-Phoria UMC2020HD geni.us/BehringerUMC202HD
HDMI Capture Device:
Atomos Ninja V geni.us/Atomos-Ninja-V
Elgato 4K60 Pro MK2 geni.us/Elgato-4K-60-Pro-MK2
Elgato 4K60 S+ geni.us/Elgato-4K60-SPlus
BlackMagic Ultrastudio Recorder 3G geni.us/UltraStudioRecorder3G
Computer & Software:
Apple MacBook Pro M1 Max geni.us/MacBook-Pro-M1-Max
Blackmagic Design DaVinci Resolve Studio geni.us/DaViniciResolveStudio
My Amazon links are affiliate links. Using these links does not cost you anything. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. This gives me a small commission when buy using my product links, at no cost to you. These commissions help my channel and their use is greatly appreciated.
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I’m David Harry. Thank you very much for watching this video, take care and goodbye now.
Cheers,
Dave.
#DavidHarry#LiverpoolTV
Thank you for the explanation! You've made it very clear and easy to understand :)
Glad it was helpful! Cheers, Dave.
This was really helpful. Great, concise, pointed video. Super work. Subbed.
I’m glad the video was helpful and thanks for the sub 👍 Cheers, Dave.
Another excellent video. These have been very helpful for me to decide which enclosure and SSD to purchase. Thanks!
Awesome, I'm glad these couple of videos have been helpful 👍 Chers, Dave
Really useful video. Thank you so much for your knowledge sharing.
Hi Deepal, you are very welcome 👍 Cheers, Dave.
Love your style, no dicking around and straight to the facts 👍
Nice one, Chris 👍 Thanks, Dave.
Thank you! Your video helps a lot!
Glad it helped! Cheers, Dave.
thanks for the.vdo, excatly what i was looking to try for
No problem 👍
Interesting results! Thanks
Thanks for watching!
it's useful, Really good video. Thank you so much for your knowledge sharing.
Hi. Thank you and you are very welcome 👍 Cheers, Dave.
So good man you covered everything...perfectly👍
Nice one, Marcus 👍 BTW the reason why I went for this WD is because I’d already used them in a PS5 and Windows system and knew how fast they were. This WD is also much faster than the 980 in real world use. I’ve not used the 990 but I’d imagine it would be very close with this WD. Also, this WD does not slow down during continuous sustained writing, it’s does about 2800MB/s in this Thunderbolt enclosure, as you can see in the other video. This high speed sustained witting may not be that important for a lot of people. However, because I do a lot of high bitrate video capture and am constantly moving video projects between my Mac and the drive, these sustained high speed write speeds were absolutely essential for me. Cheers, Dave.
@David Harry yes sustained high speed for large video transfers is important for video editing also.
I'm mainly looking at this for that very reason.
I was going to go the samsung T7 shield 4TB but after seeing this it's a no brainer at over double the speed with Acasis enclosure.
Hi, Marcus. Keep an eye on my channel and my MacBook playlist, I’m going to be doing some very specific videos about video editing with the Apple Silicon Macs and DaVinci Resolve. I’ll try and do a video as soon as I can showing this drive being used for uncompressed 1080/60 editing and also Pro Res 4444 XQ 8K/60, which this drive is easily capable of doing. Cheers, Dave.
@David Harry man sounds great. Iv just switched from windows to Macbook m2max so learning curve is steep but great.
I'm currently getting my head around final cut and pro logic but will check out your vids.
Thanks
Top video, Thank your very much !
Nice one and you are very welcome 👍 Cheers, Dave.
Thank you, Thank you, THANK YOU!!!
You are so welcome!
Holly that’s awesome!! How did we miss this. I’ve been skeptical about using APFS as a format for my hard drives just because I am afraid when I have to share data. But lately I’ve only been sharing data thru the clouds or email and electronic transferring methods. I realized I don’t use my hard drives other than on my macs for backups so I will definitely change them to APFS. Thank you so much this was very informative and amazing!!! ❤❤❤❤🎉🎉🎉🎉🎉 great videoooo
That’s pretty much the same thing that I’d realised. I’d moved away from Windows over the last couple of years and am now 99% on Mac, so using only APFS on my external drives wasn’t going to be an issue. However, I was absolutely stunned by just how much the difference was, especially in the write speeds. Cheers, Dave.
Can you do one exfat vs mac os extended journaled please
Interesting video. Now I’m curious how would the old HFS+ (MacOS Extended as they call it) fare in that comparison.
Yes, that's something to look in to. Cheers, Dave.
Hi David,
Thanks for your video! I have the same Acasis USB4.0 Thunderbolt 40Gb/s enclosure but a Samsung 970 EVO Plus 2 TB here are the differences between exFAT and APFS minimal. I do not understand what is the difference between your 4TB MB stick and my Samsung. It's not the cable to my Macbook Pro M1 MAX (Thunderbold 4 Cable) I have no idee, thanks in advance.
ExFat has no journaling and is prone to corruption especially if the external drive gets yanked or encounter power problem.
It is required if also using other computers that aren't from Apple.
Thanks, this is exactly what I was looking for. My only remaining question is how much will I miss not being able to access the device from my windows computers if I go with APFS, which you obviously can't answer. Tough decision. Exfat isn't exactly slow, so I'm leaning in that direction.
Hi, Alan. For the sake of convenience, I would just use ExFAT. I also use Windows, Chrome and Android devices, so most of my external storage is formatted to ExFAT. Also, these speed differences between APFS and ExFAT are only really noticeable with faster SSDs and the one I use in this video is the fastest you can get for a Mac using Thunderbolt and this shows the biggest difference. For typical USB C SSDs, the difference is not as much. I only use APFS for my very fast Thunderbolt SSDs that only get used for video editing on my Mac as some of the video files I use are very high bandwidth/data rates. Cheers, Dave.
Thanks for this video. One thing I would like to know. Which one is more secure and less likely to have file corruption?
Hi. File corruption isn't so much of an issue with either format. However, APFS does have security advantages. I would only personally use ExFAT if you need to read and write to a drive in operating systems other than macOS. Cheers, Dave.
I formatted a 4tb USB SSD to exFAT for my Mac studio so i could also use it in windows and Mac. Speed tests were around 770MB read/write so I thought all was good. Then in actual use ( I use if for virtual Instruments for orchestrations work) it was slow as hell, like literally 10MBs read 2MB write. After doing some digging on forums it turns out that if you use it for huge instrument libraries it can't load thousands of tiny files in near real time like NTFS or APFS can so it's a useless format for musicians/ composers who use large VST's.
It ends up being way way slower than an old spinning rust drive for this scenario. Some of the VSTi software even refuses to be installed on exFAT because of this problem. I'll leave this here just in case anyone is in the same boat as me looking for a Mac PC compatible format for DAW work. This will save them the headache I had with it
I’ve used Cubase for almost 35 years and transitioned with it from Atari to Windows to MacOS. I also transitioned with it from it being MIDI only to audio (XT) and through to the start of VST and ASIO, right up to 13 Pro with its current iterations of VST and ASIO and I’ve also extensively used Nuendo. During that time I’ve never experienced anything that you’ve described and have never had any issues installing or running VST instruments, VST effects or libraries from external ExFAT drives. I’ve even done this with mechanical hard drives before using solid state drives. BTW, you don’t mention the Mac used, the OS, the Mac hardware, the drive model, the cable, the format scheme or the speed test method etc. etc. etc.
Hi David, 'm using an M1 Max Mac studio 64GB, Ventura. VSL instruments refuse to install on any exFAT drive. here's a direct paste from VSL ''While exFAT should not be used at all for ANY kind of sample work due to its poor performance handling, The Vienna Assistant no longer allows installation on exFAT because certain features of our Synchron Players are incompatible with exFAT drives. We do not wish to compromise future improvement and development to keep a drive format around that was not officially supported to begin with.'' Spitfire libraries ( not including the Kontakt ones) give you a warning advising you not to use exFAT but then it will let you override it by giving an option to do it anyway. Native Instruments say 'You can run libraries with ExFat format, but the load time will be considerably slower- which will be very annoying in the long run. You are much better reformatting' another from Native Instruments on their main page ''Drives formatted as 'exFAT', which technically allows the drive to be used with both Mac and Windows computers, will cause issues such as:
Slow library loading times in KONTAKT, KOMPLETE KONTROL and MASCHINE
Playback can become glitchy
More prone to corruption when data transfer is disturbed'' Like you David I've been using Cubase for a very long time'' David, i didn't even know this was a thing until i recently started using exFAT and noticed just how slow it was. At more common things like moving large videos it seems absolutely fine. All the best
@@mrchrisbeaver Hi Chris.
That’s a massive surprise for me. In the past I used to work a lot with score for TV and film. Myself and my business partner at the time used to use quite a few PCs for music. My production stuff was mostly typical pop music stuff. However, I built my partneters systems which were very specifically for orchestral simulations for score.
The score systems where essentially just for the Vienna strings and orchestral libraries. These were quite extensive. One master PC with Nuendo and then extra PCs as “sound modules”. All machines used Hammerfall cards with ADAT or MADI to connect together.
Quite a lot of the library hard drives used were formatted MBR ExFAT, for various reasons including redundant backups. Although we did have certain sound library issues, which were common with such systems, these issues would still be the same even using NTFS.
I find it strange that some manufacturers are either not recommending or simply not allowing installations to ExFAT. What I don’t understand about that is the fact that sound libraries, such as those for orchestral instruments, don’t use small files. When I say small files I mean in the range of bytes and a few kilobytes, such as what you would have on web servers etc. with thousands of small database extension files etc.
Even just a short staccato note sample of a string will be quite large as far as data is concerned. Then moving on to long sustained samples or phrases, these will be massive as far as data sizes are concerned.
The only real issue for loading or streaming libraries was the access times but this was down to seek times between the heads and platters of mechanical disks. Even back then, the file system itself had very little, if no, impact to anything. Moving to solid state, even with SATA, all but made seek times a none issue. Then moving up to fast Gen4 NVMe and now Gen 5, the read speeds are way beyond even the most complex score. Indeed, the computer’s processing power is going to become the bottleneck and not the drives.
While I haven’t used orchestral libraries for a long time and I no longer do music production, I still have a Cubase setup for those times I need to scratch that itch. This system has had instances where my entire V Colletion 9 plugins and libraries are on an external ExFAT TB4 SSD, along with an FX4 installation and some other bits, with no issues at all.
I’ve even had external drives with multiple partitions and formats, even with secondary boot loaders etc. with libraries and installs etc. not giving me any issues using ExFAT on certain storage partitions.
While I’m not technically “streaming” libraries in these setups, as these are mostly synths and not sample players. I still have to load a number of plugins and libraries and “some” streaming elements and also the audio elements from these ExFAT drives and have never had issues with the format type.
BTW. The only reason why I’m using ExFAT is because I do also use Windows and I also have a particular cloning workflow. I also store more than audio on my external drives and as I use 4TB TB4/USB4 drives, which are quite expensive. I have to get the most economical use out of them, hence the plugins/audio being used on video media drives that also double up as short to midterm back ups.
Anyway, the point that I’m making is that access and transfer speeds on ExFAT are essentially the same as OS specific formats such as NTFS and APFS etc. Which is why I’m surprised there are issues. The issues may actually be database type issues and access via specific OS routines. NTFS, as a for instance, has more robust security and data integrity features as well as logging functions. Maybe it’s these functions that some of the later plugin/library manufacturers are relying on, which ExFAT simply doesn’t have or support and it’s not so much the speed of ExFAT…….?
Anyway, Chris. Thanks for mentioning this, it’s been very interesting and it’s definitely a consideration for certain workflows and hopefully your comment will be useful for others 👍
Cheers,
Dave.
Hi, I have an external Sandisk 4TB SSD and works pretty similar formatting the disk with the 2 options, in fact a works bit faster with the ExFat format. (write 885 Ex fat / write - similar Read for both) 🤔 2017 iMac High Sierra, Intel. Maybe the OSX is too old?
Hes testing an Apple silicon M1 not a intel computer.
The both of iPad Pro get 120fps but m1 it’s only 120hz?
on my ssd it is the same speed, why is that?
Good demo Dave! I guess exfat is the more universal format!
Alright Tone. Yes, ExFAT is defo more universal, APFS only really gets used on Apple devices. Cheers, Dave.
ExFAT is not a secure fomat chances are high for corruption
Hi David, have you test the wdsn850x vs the latest samsung 990 pro. I m planing to build one and would go with your expertise on which is going to be better
Hi. Both of those SSDs will be the same speed in this enclosure. Cheers, Dave.
I just ordered the acasis w fan and Jeyi ASM2464 chip w fan to test w this SN850X ssd. Hopefully Jeyi w the latest chip can provide a stable higher read and write speed since it has the latest asm chip, and the fan is automatically turn on unlike the acasis. When they are all delivered and I run the test, I will provide you with an update. I learned all the beginning baby steps here thanks to you.Thanks and cheers ❤️
tnx
You are very welcome 👍
Nice just want thing
The iPad Pro 2020 not m1 can get 120hz on cod mobile in ultra mp setting?
No 👍
There is no difference in speed between exFAT and APFS on iMac 2020 27" for Samsung T9. I can get 1000 MB/s, although it claims a speed up to 2000 MB/s.
Can you don the same tests but with an HDD instead of a SSD?
I'll be doing a video soon with a recommendation with a large 18TB hard drive for long term and archive backup use with the Macs, I'll do the ExFAT and APFS test with that HDD. Cheers, Dave.
How does the 980 pro stack up against the 850x ??Anybody know ?
There won't be any difference between them in this configuration as both are way faster than the speed of the enclosure and Thunderbolt 3 or 4. Although, I wouldn't use cheap SSDs as they won't have the constant sustain speed of the 980 or 850x. Cheers, Dave.
@@DavidHarry I put a 850x in a Fedging thunder and I am getting 2700R x 2600W using ventura .Note Ventura was crashing a few times a day..Resetting the NVRAM/PRAM and SMC fixed my problem immediately running an M1 Mac ...Hope this helps the community ...
👍
I tried the same test with a 10gb enclosure on an M2 Mac Mini and xFAT was slightly quicker.
Hi. That's interesting. Every SSD that I've tried is faster under APFS. Cheers, Dave.
My M1 pro, thunder4 40Gbps，with exFat write 3700+,read 2900+; with AFPS write 3000+, read 2900+, encrypted write 2600+ read 2900+
It looks like you are calculating your speeds incorrectly. The absolute maximum you can get with any TB4 enclosure is 2800MB/s. Cheers, Dave.
the SSD is a PCIe4 and 7600MB/s 4T TLC, YMTC, test by Blackmagic Disk Speed Test for Mac@@DavidHarry
Controller is ASM2464@@DavidHarry
@@govoli1922 Yes, the SSD itself is very fast, around 7000MB/s but the Thunderbolt enclosure can only allow a maximum of 2800MB/s. This means that the enclosure will throttle the speed of the SSD to around 28000MB/s. If you look at any videos anywhere on CZcams or the internet where people have done testing of any Thunderbolt drive, you will never see anyone getting faster than about 2800MB/s on any Thunderbolt drive. Cheers, Dave.
Quit calling it "WB Black".
why?