Help! Which is best format for FCPX edit on external HD: APFS or MacOS Extented (Journalled)?

Hi Forum,

Just need an advice:

Which is the best format type for an efficient FCPX edits on external HD: APFS or Mac OS Extented (Journalled)?
I've got my new WD Elements 4TB planned to use to ediit low res (1080p) projects on it.

Mojavi 10.14.6 running on external fast SSD APFS formatted and FCPX 10.4.6 iMac 5K 2015 (internal HD is not SSD)

Much appreciated for the support,

Soran

Assuming the 4 TB is not an SSD I'd suggest Mac OS Extended.

If you're running on Mojave on an external drive, I'd suggest you put FCP onto that drive rather than the internal. Just copy it to the Applications folder.

Many thanks Tom!

I have been formatting all my hard drives to exFAT. I don't have any problems using them on my Mac or PC. I don't really collaborate between the two operating systems but if I had to I can. As far as I can tell exFAT works just fine.

We have both Extended and APFS on external drives, both single drives and RAIDS, both SSD and HDD drives (we have tons of external drives). I find no difference in performance. Since we're excited to move forward with Catalina (installing beta today) and committed to the Mac platform, we're going to format all new drives APFS. Personal preference, as I can find no practical reasons to not use APFS, if the drives will only be used by Mojave/Catalina Macs.

Because of the way APFS builds content on the drive, a number of experts have advised avoiding it on spinning drives, though it works well for SSDs. it probably is a wash until the drive starts to fill.

Have an y thoughts on Catalina?

Before widely deploying APFS on external drives, it's probably a good idea to consider how certain 3rd-party utilities might be affected. Carbon Copy and Disk Warrior are updated for APFS, I don't know about others:

bombich.com/kb/ccc5/everything-you-need-...copy-cloner-and-apfs
www.alsoft.com/diskwarrior/highsierraapfs.html

I notice on my internal 1TB and 2TB internal SSDs, Disk Utility First Aid can take much longer to run with APFS than with HFS+, apparently due to checking all the snapshots.

Is there any noticeable performance and stability gain in deploying APFS on external or internal SSD drives? when running FCPX and Mac OS Mojavi/Catalina?

What about FCPX ecosystem plugins?

I noticed a possible slight performance gain, but subjective, using APFS for the SSD system drive. Disk Warrior has been working for over a year to be able to repair APFS and still can't do it. They can check an APFS drive, but not repair it. Making it useless for me. I miss it a lot.

I have an 8 bay Promise RAID as APFS and it runs just fine, no issues.

Recently found this article by Bombich Carbon Copy Cloner makers on performance hits when using APFS on spinning hard drives. bombich.com/blog/2019/09/12/analysis-apf...m_source=xlr8yourmac
I think that I disagree with the last paragraph, but then I think that the pluses of APFS is not that great on spinning drives, so I do not recommend APFS on hdds at this time.
There are indeed other issues as reported around the web.
eclecticlight.co/2018/02/17/is-apfs-fully-supported-yet/

APFS has improved for spinning disks, remember when you couldn't even use APFS for hdds or Fusion Drives. Time Machine still doesn't work and is HFS+ only. If Apple can't do it…? HFS+ despite being long in tooth performs fine and maintains backwards compatibility, so for me, there are not benefits that make it necessary.

As for ExFAT and other formatting options, Why?? The only reason to use non-native drive formats is if you need to share a drive with a Windows computer. Even MS is moving away from ExFAT and now defaults to NTFS which has some of the benefits of write protections, larger block sizing, and more. There is no benefit to using ExFAT and you lose all of the benefits of APFS like write on copy, fast encryption, etc…; while increasing the likely hood of slowdowns and corruption. Yes I know for some folks, they never experience issues, but Why? Just my 2c

Hope this Helps, Greg
p.s. I do use ExFAT for thumb drives for movie distribution. ExFAT is more universal. I also recommend if you do need to share to PCs.

The second article is a High Sierra only and outdated, to my mind.

I fully agree with the last paragraph in the Bombich article.

Again, we're doing fast turn around broadcast editing, we don't find HDDs suffering in the real world from APFS.

TimeMachine is backing up several APFS system drives for me, so yes, it is compatible.

All our systems are running the latest versions of Mojave, just FYI. And I don't think it matters. If you're not a techy, stick with HFS+, nothing wrong with that. For system drives, APFS for sure.

Just my 2 cents from the broadcast trenches.

VidGreg wrote: As for ExFAT and other formatting options, Why?? The only reason to use non-native drive formats is if you need to share a drive with a Windows computer. Even MS is moving away from ExFAT and now defaults to NTFS which has some of the benefits of write protections, larger block sizing, and more. There is no benefit to using ExFAT and you lose all of the benefits of APFS like write on copy, fast encryption, etc…; while increasing the likely hood of slowdowns and corruption. Yes I know for some folks, they never experience issues, but Why? Just my 2c

MS Windows never defaulted to exFAT. Windows has always default to NTFS. NTFS and APFS have extra features that I don't use. On the other hand if I want to move to Mac or PC I can with an exFAT drive. I can also share the drives with other people on both platforms. I like that. I was just stating I don't have any problems in case anyone was thinking about exFAT as an option.

I've not needed an ExFat drive in almost two years to move things between computers. WiFi LAN and Cloud-based services take care of all that for me. Sneakernet is a dying technology.

VidGreg wrote: ... Even MS is moving away from ExFAT and now defaults to NTFS which has some of the benefits of write protections, larger block sizing, and more. There is no benefit to using ExFAT and you lose all of the benefits of APFS like write on copy, fast encryption, etc…. I do use ExFAT for thumb drives for movie distribution. ExFAT is more universal. I also recommend if you do need to share to PCs.

For data offloading ExFAT is OK. In fact the camera cards are usually ExFAT.

We shoot a lot of multi-camera 4k ProRes material so it's just too large for easy internet file transfer. LAN/SAN transfer is OK if everyone is on 10-gig ethernet. Otherwise it can mean handoff of physical media.

In a collaborative FCPX environment the problem with ExFAT on "shuttle" or offloading drives is these often get mixed up as media drives. An editor will be handed a nice fast Samsung T5 or similar drive, be told "this is today's material", and instead of copying that to their RAID they will import straight from the ExFAT-formatted T5.

Yes this is fundamentally a training issue but I've seen it happen many times. Then you end up with active FCPX media on ExFAT which generally works but is not as safe or as well tested. ExFAT is not journaled so it's less resilient to a system crash. What if the ingest workflow involves Finder tags or maybe later use of FindrCat to export FCPX keywords to Finder tags? How well does ExFAT support that and Spotlight indexing of those? I don't know but that would concern me.

FCPX is not doing only large sequential reads from media files but heavy-duty random IOs to the SQLite database, and sometimes even the library gets placed on the ExFAT "shuttle" drive.

With increasing use of ProRes material and USB-C SSD drives, this seems more common. The editor figures out the ExFAT-formatted T5 is really nice and fast so they just put the library on that and keep using it. But when doing critical database operations, a conservative approach is wise. While ExFAT is tested and supported on macOS, it is probably not the highest priority in Apple's test matrix for FCPX.

You can use Paragon NTFS on Mac or Paragon HFS on Windows, but the user base of people using that for heavy-duty FCPX work is relatively small.

In an all-Mac or mostly-Mac environment using physical media, you can just decree that all drives including shuttle drives are HFS+. In the less frequent case a non-Mac user needs the data, then it can be copied to ExFAT or NTFS. If using a SAN or LAN it doesn't make any difference.

In a mixed Windows/Mac environment which uses physical media, this won't work. Using ExFAT for shuttle drives is the simplest solution and if all downstream FCPX editors understand they shouldn't import from those drives, it's OK. If you can't keep the editors trained on this, then making separate ExFAT/NTFS copies for the Windows people is one solution. As FCPX.guru said physical handoff implies physical proximity and increasingly (even in a field environment) all key people are connected to a LAN/SAN of some type. This by itself solves most problems.

FCPX.guru wrote: I've not needed an ExFat drive in almost two years to move things between computers. WiFi LAN and Cloud-based services take care of all that for me. Sneakernet is a dying technology.

No one is arguing with that nor I am not suggesting that everyone will need to use exFAT. My Mac and PC are not networked together nor is everyone else's. I am simply saying if I do buy an iMac next year for my main editing platform my hard drives will work with both operating system instead of just one.I like having that option. I posted in case someone is thinking about buying a PC( exFAT does work).