APFS / Ex-Fat, NTFS - format protocols

Sootchucker

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Question please on NVME format protocols.

I recently purchased an 8TB Lexar NM790 NVME drive along with a OCW Express 1M2 external thunderbolt 4 enclosure, to act as a backup to my photos from my QNAP NAS.

Because originally I was going to use the drive between our Windows home PC and my MacBook pro / Mac Mini, I decided to format it as Ex-Fat so it was readable on both platforms. However after copying all the data across -about 6.5tb, (which took an age as my QNAP currently only has a 1Gbe NIC connection) I noticed when doing disk speed test (using Black Magic Disk Speed Test and AJA System test), I was getting abysmal read and write speeds from the external drive when connected to both my MBP/ Mac Mini and Windows 11 PC. It was slower than a traditional spinning HDD at about 150-175 MB/Sec write. I ran the rest multiple times on both platforms and whilst each test was slightly different, I was basically getting the same speeds time after time.

I then bit the bullet and decided to format the NVME as APFS, and then copied the same 6.5tb across again. Once done (which was quite a bit quicker), I again ran the speed tests, and on my 2022 MPB M1 Max, equipped with Thunderbolt 4 ports, and I was now getting over 3,000 mb/sec read and write (which is sort of what I expected from a 40mbps connection which has a maximum theoretical speed of 5,000 Mb/Sec ).

Does anyone know why APFS is so much faster than Ex-Fat ?
 
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APFS is optimized for SSD vs Exfat that is nearly 20 years old?
 
I'm assuming the APFS speed is only with the MBP?
A review of the enclosure you have suggests unexpectedly slow results (similar to those you saw) with windows that require changes to some default settings to resolve.
I wonder if the MBP has hardware optimised for external APFS devices (and uses firmware instead for other formats)?
 
To be fair I haven't tried it yet on the PC since, as APFS isn't readable on Windows computers by default. I did note a while ago that the default Windows 11 Disc Removal Policy is set to "Quick Removal", and I changed this to "Better Performance" as below, and it did seem to make a little bit of a difference but still no where near the results I'm now getting on APFS.

 
Just a thought - did you try another cable? - I say this because one cable I tried was a lot slower than another
 
To be fair no, as I'm using the TB4 cable that came with the OCW drive enclosure. Just don't understand why it's so quick as APFS and so slow as Ex-Fat.

Oh well, doesn't really matter I suppose as I tend to use my Mac almost exclusively (I leave the PC to my wife who hasn't yet embraced Mac OS :-) )
 
APFS should be a bit faster than exFAT since as mentioned above it's optmised for SSDs but the speeds you're seeing are definitely not right and when having a look into it I found a number of people complaining exFAT was faster than APFS on their Apple systems.

I haven't used APFS but I have a couple of fast exFAT drives and their performance is what I'd expect for the type of device.
 
I have had a similar experience, I have a couple of OWC 1M2 enclosures I use, APFS formatted SSDs and they work as expected (~3000mb/s). I have 4TB external Crucial X9 drive formatted as exFAT and it is massively inconsistent with both my MacBook, Mac Studio and a couple of Windows PC. The only time I get anything like the expected speed (~900mb/s) is on an old w10 Thinkpad... I have a couple of older Samsung SSDs also exFAT and these are fine... Not had the patience to dig into the issue, have tried a range of cables and it seems to be an exFAT issue, the drive was fine when I reformatted it and tried APFS, except I could not use it to easily move data from PC to Mac.
 
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