“I’m not sure Apple absolutely had to replace HFS+, but likely they had passed an inflection point where continuing to maintain and evolve the 30+ year old software was more expensive than building something new,” Adam H. Leventhal writes for Ars Technica. “APFS is a product born of that assessment.”
“There are some seemingly absent or ancillary design goals: performance, openness, and data integrity. Squeezing the most IOPS or throughput out of a device probably isn’t critical on watchOS, and it’s relevant only to a small percentage of macOS users,” Leventhal writes. “It will be interesting to see how APFS performs once it ships.”
“It’s a shame that APFS lacks checksums for user data and doesn’t provide for data redundancy. Data integrity should be job one for a file system, and I believe that’s true for a watch or phone as much as it is for a server,” Leventhal writes. “APFS will be an improvement at stability for Apple users of all kinds, on every device. There are some clear wins and some missed opportunities. Now that APFS has been shared with the world, the development team is probably listening. While Apple is clearly years past the decision to build from scratch rather than adopting existing modern technology, there’s time to raise the priority of data integrity and openness.”
Tons more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yes, there’s still time for improvement and refinement.
SEE ALSO:
APFS: What Apple’s new Apple File System means to you – June 24, 2016
APFS: New Apple File System promises more speed, flexibility, reliability – June 17, 2016
The feds’ll hate this: Apple’s new APFS file system ‘engineered with encryption as a primary feature’ – June 14, 2016
Buh-bye HFS+, hello APFS (Apple File System) for macOS! – June 14, 2016
Apple can do better than Sun’s ZFS – October 26, 2009
Apple discontinues ZFS project, turns attention to own next-gen file system – October 24, 2009
Apple’s Mac OS X Snow Leopard Server’s ZFS goes MIA – June 9, 2009