Siri’s New Boss, APFS Fusion Drive Issues – TMO Daily Observations 2017-09-01
Dave Hamilton and John Martellaro join Jeff Gamet to share their perspective on Siri’s management being reassigned from Eddy Cue to Craig Federighi, plus they discuss APFS compatibility issues with Fusion Drives in macOS High Sierra.
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Show Notes
- Craig Federighi is Siri's new boss
- APFS and Fusion Drive issues in macOS High Sierra
- TMO Daily Observations Twitter feed
Here’s my admission:
I put HighSierra on my laptop with solid-state, and it’s worked pretty much faultlessly from the first ß.
So I decided to do it to my fusion-drived iMac. It did the APFS conversion (because I clicked on the box – oh well). It booted fine, but the response was deathly slow so I reformatted the drive and restored from my backup. That appeared to work fairly well. But I was wrong. I tried to do a disk repair because I suspected that something was wrong a few days later, but I couldn’t get it to repair because it couldn’t get a lock on the drive. This meant that DiskWarrior was never going to be successful.
It was still backing up OK, so I took another backup to be absolutely bang up to date. I suspected, correctly, that there was something wrong with the disk’s formatting, and that when I had restored from the backup it hadn’t reformatted back to HFS+ properly.
I did a command-R boot and tried to format the drive, but it didn’t like it. So, after quite a bit of web searching on my laptop, I found a command that allowed me to scrap the MDB. Using diskutil cs commands just wasn’t sufficient, because the MDB was subtly corrupted.
Once I had turned the MDB to mush, I was able to use diskutil to delete the hybrid drive, recreate it and then reformat it. Then I could restore from the backup and everything went well.
Once I was going for a few days without any issues (response was snappy, I could get a lock on the drive), I successfully re-installed High Sierra again, but kept it at HFS+.
A week or so later, I reformatted as APFS (before I heard this podcast!) and again I haven’t had any problems. If you don’t know what the moral of this story is, you haven’t been listening…
As an aside, my wife discovered our old ZIP 250 drive. Being an idiot, I formatted that as APFS. It works fine! Who would have thought? Now, where’s that old external floppy drive…