macOS 28 will not support encrypted HFS+ volumes | Hacker News Reader

macOS 28 will not support encrypted HFS+ volumes

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49 pointsLihh2716 comments

I wonder why they're removing support for encryption when clearly they have the code for it and still supporting the actual FS

They're dropping the underlying CoreStorage LVM engine, which was bolted on to HFS+ to support full-disk encryption and later, hybrid SSD/HDD volumes.

I have a big external spinning HDD. Someone suggested creating an encrypted APFS partition, and put a single big file inside (mount it as unencrypted HFS+ image). Would this work? And would I still suffer from APFS's horrible HDD performance?

Curious why would someone prefer HFS+ over APFS?

Because APFS is slllloooowowwwwwww on HDDs. On a 6xHDD promise thunderbolt array, it’s brutally crippling over time.

One reason is APFS is designed for SSDs and assumes each disk block has an equal latency to read it.

I think Apple hasn't sold anything with an HDD for 5+ years though?

Billions of externals HDD exist, continue to be sold, and are the best price/performance/durability for external backup drives though?

As another poster already noted, external HDDs may be needed, especially because Apple computers have only puny (or greatly overpriced) SSDs.

Usually both at the same time. Soldered on the board and unchangeable.

External HDDs.

You can access an encrypted HFS+ partition from macOS and Linux machines natively. Very useful for sharing data between Asahi and macOS, and in general between Linux machines and macOS.

wasn't hfs read only on Linux?

hfsplus driver supports write for both journaled and non-journaled partitions, though it only mounts r/w by default for non-journaled partitions.

It's not necessarily a question of preference. A lot of older disks are HFS+ simply because they're older, so this is breaking backward compatibility.

Curious why Apple chose to remove support for spinning disks. APFS is designed for flash storage, not hard drive storage.

For those of us with encrypted spinning disks sitting in a fire safe/deposit box for a decade or more, macOS suddenly won't be able to mount them for data retrevial because of a software block. If we want to move our cold storage to APFS encryption, we'll need to replace the spinning discs with expensive flash storage, or live with slow fragmented access.

For comparison, I can still pull out a USB floppy disk or CD drive, connect it to modern macOS, and read a shoebox of floppies/discs inherited from my grandfather.

Digital Data https://m.xkcd.com/1683/

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