THE SPEED OF APFS: Just how fast is it? Tim Standing investigates.

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by Tim Standing, Vice President of Software Engineering, OWC Holdings Inc.

November 15, 2017

From previous testing, I knew that an HFS Extended volume with 2 ThunderBlades striped together could go go faster than 4 gigabytes per second on both reads and writes.

Speed of HFS Extended volume on 2 OWC ThunderBlades striped together with SoftRAID

So just how fast is the release version of APFS which comes with High Sierra? Can it keep up with HFS? To find out, I created an APFS volume using a beta copy of SoftRAID version 6 and two ThunderBlades.

As you can see, the APFS volume is almost exactly the same speed as HFS Extended.

Speed of APFS volume on 2 OWC ThunderBlades striped together with SoftRAID

APFS & HFS Extended Finder copy speeds with ThunderBlades, SSDs and HDDs
note: the taller columns represent slower copying speeds, so shorter is better!