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Thanks for sharing Apple's rationale, but I disagree. The bottleneck is space, not speed, of SSDs. Few people need a GB per second of read or write more than th

Thanks for sharing Apple's rationale, but I disagree. The bottleneck is space, not speed, of SSDs. Few people need a GB per second of read or write more than they need space. If compression gives me even a GB of extra space on a 128GB SSD, I'd take it. In fact, a 7200RPM hard disc is adequate for me.

veidr 9y ago
I would respectfully argue that you perhaps are the outlier, rather than the people who want more speed out of their direct-attached storage. Disk speed was the most significant performance bottleneck for years — a point that Apple has repeatedly made in their developer guidelines on performance[1]. I think this is (happily) starting to be less of a concern with these new SSDs capable of 2GB-3GB/second. The 1TB SSD in my 2013 Mac Pro benchmarks at 1GB/sec and I find doubling/tripling that an extremely attractive proposition. Other than offline backups and archiving systems, I literally haven't used a spinning-magnetic-media storage device since 2013 (and avoided them when possible before that). And I definitely don't plan to ever do so again. [1]: e.g. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/PerformanceOverview/DevelopingForPerf/DevelopingForPerf.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...
- kartickv 9y ago
  I wonder if this is a divide between geeks / power users / developers on one hand, who want more speed, and average users, who want more space. Every time someone talks about speed, that statement comes from a geek. By contrast, I have heard non-technical people complain about insufficient space on their 128GB Macbooks, but not about the speed. Maybe my sample size isn't big enough. I don't know. When you said that people want more speed out of their storage, sure, we all want it in the abstract, but did you mean even at the cost of having less space for a higher price? My iMac's Fusion Drive failed, in the sense of not using the SSD at all, and I didn't notice much difference except in specific situations, like booting, app startup and swapping. On the whole, I wasn't any less productive or more irritated with a hard disc. A small screen, a slower Internet connection and having to move data back and forth to external hard discs are a bigger pain for me than the speed of a hard disc, assuming it's 7200 RPM.
astrodust 9y ago
You're in the minority and that minority is shrinking. APFS isn't being designed for HDDs, support for them is more of a concession than a concern, as the future is, clearly, SSD or better. SSDs already have higher capacities than any HDD, and soon their price will drop down to parity and then below as SSD gains continue to outpace those in the HDD domain. We're in the transition period here where, for the next few years, SSD space will still be at a premium vs. HDD. Beyond that the SSD will offer vastly more storage than you could possibly need at a cost you can afford. In the interim if compression gives you an extra GB of space then make a compressed volume and mount that. It's fully under your control.
- kartickv 9y ago
  Maybe you're right that in a few years, I'll be able to buy a 6TB SSD for the $200 I'd pay for a hard disc today, but speaking as a user about to buy a computer, I want one that works great today. Which means worrying less about filling up my paltry 128GB SSD. The other, non-technical, solution is for Apple to make 512GB SSDs standard :) But Apple is going in the other direction, introducing a 128GB SSD.

veidr 9y ago

I would respectfully argue that you perhaps are the outlier, rather than the people who want more speed out of their direct-attached storage. Disk speed was the most significant performance bottleneck for years — a point that Apple has repeatedly made in their developer guidelines on performance[1]. I think this is (happily) starting to be less of a concern with these new SSDs capable of 2GB-3GB/second. The 1TB SSD in my 2013 Mac Pro benchmarks at 1GB/sec and I find doubling/tripling that an extremely attractive proposition. Other than offline backups and archiving systems, I literally haven't used a spinning-magnetic-media storage device since 2013 (and avoided them when possible before that). And I definitely don't plan to ever do so again. [1]: e.g. https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Performance/Conceptual/PerformanceOverview/DevelopingForPerf/DevelopingForPerf.html https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Pe...

kartickv 9y ago
I wonder if this is a divide between geeks / power users / developers on one hand, who want more speed, and average users, who want more space. Every time someone talks about speed, that statement comes from a geek. By contrast, I have heard non-technical people complain about insufficient space on their 128GB Macbooks, but not about the speed. Maybe my sample size isn't big enough. I don't know. When you said that people want more speed out of their storage, sure, we all want it in the abstract, but did you mean even at the cost of having less space for a higher price? My iMac's Fusion Drive failed, in the sense of not using the SSD at all, and I didn't notice much difference except in specific situations, like booting, app startup and swapping. On the whole, I wasn't any less productive or more irritated with a hard disc. A small screen, a slower Internet connection and having to move data back and forth to external hard discs are a bigger pain for me than the speed of a hard disc, assuming it's 7200 RPM.

astrodust 9y ago

You're in the minority and that minority is shrinking. APFS isn't being designed for HDDs, support for them is more of a concession than a concern, as the future is, clearly, SSD or better. SSDs already have higher capacities than any HDD, and soon their price will drop down to parity and then below as SSD gains continue to outpace those in the HDD domain. We're in the transition period here where, for the next few years, SSD space will still be at a premium vs. HDD. Beyond that the SSD will offer vastly more storage than you could possibly need at a cost you can afford. In the interim if compression gives you an extra GB of space then make a compressed volume and mount that. It's fully under your control.

kartickv 9y ago
Maybe you're right that in a few years, I'll be able to buy a 6TB SSD for the $200 I'd pay for a hard disc today, but speaking as a user about to buy a computer, I want one that works great today. Which means worrying less about filling up my paltry 128GB SSD. The other, non-technical, solution is for Apple to make 512GB SSDs standard :) But Apple is going in the other direction, introducing a 128GB SSD.