That’s true. But I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc where as long as the hard drive can keep up with the streaming requirements - any hard drive can - it doesn’t matter.
The other purpose is backups. Again if my backups are slow, who cares?
> I don’t really care about the performance of my external hard drives. They store movies, photos, etc
I care very very very much about the speed of the drive that stores my video files. I need to be able to open and seek through them quickly so I can find the clip I'm looking for. When you're working with ProRes stuff, this becomes a big deal.
Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(
> Luckily, good quality spinning hard drives can be fast enough, at least for my needs. Unfortunately, they're only fast enough when they're not running APFS. :(
Nothing prevents you from putting for videos on an HFS+ volume and use it from Catalina. It just can't boot from one.
Good point—this conversation got a little muddled. I actually use either ZFS or NTFS + Tuxera for external drives on Mac, which works great (especially ZFS).
Just listing a bunch of photos is going to have terrible performance on APFS. They don't need to make it work amazingly on hard drives, but they need to do some basic things like lumping together related metadata.
The other purpose is backups. Again if my backups are slow, who cares?