To make a long story short, here are the results:<p><pre><code> Speed in MB/s
HFS+ HFS+ Encrypted APFS APFS Encrypted
1M WRITE 1375 1373 1372 933
1M READ 2446 2340 2162 1304
4K WRITE 852 797 502 378
4K READ 2106 1486 2156 1001</code></pre>
This is using a beta of High Sierra from July. I'm very curious to know what the speeds are now, when High Sierra is officially out.<p>Also, it appears that this test was all done on that High Sierra beta - I think it would be helpful to have HFS+ numbers from Sierra (the predecessor of High Sierra). But I am very happy that this article really discusses how encryption can detract from speed. I have my mac's internal drive encrypted, and I'm always interested to see if updates will slow that encryption down or not
Funnily enough, HFS+ wasn't a particularly well-performing filesystem to begin with (if compared with say... EXT4, which is similar in terms of features).
Semi off topic, but ... Is There a way in high Sierra to stop finder from littering every directory with thumbnails and other files?<p>There was (is?) a configuration that stops it for network paths, and 10.10 used to have aseptic (a kext that redirected those) but as far as I know there was no way in 10.11 or 10.13
I just upgraded my old iMac (Mid 2010) to High Sierra which has a custom upgraded drive (Crucial 500GB). Running encrypted (FileVault) on previous Sierra and new High Sierra.<p>I am not seeing any difference in terms of read and write performance according to Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.<p>Solid 250 MB/S read and write for both HFS+ Encrypted and APFS Encrypted.<p>The caveat is that I know the iMac machine is old. I am in the process of upgrading my one month old 2017 MacBook Pro with Touchbar to High Sierra and will return with those results to see if indeed APFS encrypted shows a significant slowdown on newer hardware.
OSX always had deep I/O issues with Docker. I was hopeful that the new filesystem would fix the issues there but looking at the results it looks like things are gonna be worse. Anyone got any benchmarks there?
Beat me by 13 minutes! I suppose considering the benefits of APFS that the perf decreases on writes are understandable and the reads are on par with HFS+. Not bad.
Given that MacOS is primarily a personal OS, the slight decrease in performance, that I am sure will be fixed as it APFS matures, is completely unimportant.<p>What is important however is that file name are finally case sensitive! (I know you could do the same with HFS+, but some applications didn’t support it, ie Adobe)