APFS container over multiple physical disks

Question

I have an encrypted APFS container with several volumes. The container lives on a physical partition (disk0s1), which is followed by more partitions (disk0s2, ...) with no free space in between. I need to expand one of the volumes on the container without having to move the other physical partitions in order to expand disk0s1. I know with LVM you can expand the container (physical volume) with other partitions which don't need to be adjacent, or even on the same hard drive. Is that possible with an APFS container?

Answer 1

There is no official documented way to add another physical storage to an existing APFS container.

I tried several possibly "undocumented" apfsVerbs like addPhysical, addPhysicalStorage or addStorage without success.

The feature may still be implemented later, since creating APFS FusionLCs is possible already:

diskutil ap createContainer [-main] device [-secondary] [device]

Example:

$ diskutil ap createContainer disk1s2 disk2s2    
Creating container with disk1s2 disk2s2
Started APFS operation on disk1s2 Data
Creating a new empty APFS Container
Unmounting Volumes
Switching disk1s2 to APFS
Switching disk2s2 to APFS
Creating APFS Container
FusionLC autodetect: LC Fusion
Created new APFS Container disk4
Disk from APFS operation: disk4
Finished APFS operation on disk1s2 Data

$ diskutil ap addVolume disk4 APFS Data
Exporting new unencrypted APFS Volume "Data" from APFS Container Reference disk4
Started APFS operation on disk4
Preparing to add APFS Volume to APFS Container disk4
Creating APFS Volume
Created new APFS Volume disk4s1
Mounting APFS Volume
Setting volume permissions
Disk from APFS operation: disk4s1
Finished APFS operation on disk4

Answer 2

In my case 2x 1TB SSD under Big Sur the above answer led to a big problem:

2 SSD's were partitioned in 4 parts:

• 2x64GB on disk 0 and 1
• 2x936GB on disk 0 and 1

Following the above guide I:

• created a 128GB APFS 'system' disk from disk0s2 and disk 1s2 in container disk3

And:

• created a 1.8TB APFS 'data' disk from disk 0s4 and disk 1s4 using RAID0 that works flawless.

All created APFS (test) volumes in the disk3 container failed on exactly 50% of disk usage (the physical boundary) with a disk full error. This problem does not occur in JHFS+ In all cases Disk Utility states all is OK

The problem occurs in both MacOS 11.6.5 as 12.3 with disk managementd 1934.101.3