I want to install either 10.15 or Big Sur on a small APFS partiton on an internal 1 TB HDD in a Mac Mini. I've clean installed OSX and many other OSses before and am quite comfortable installing OSes.
I'm on an older OS X version and some updated applications I use are now 10.15 or higher. There's only one OSX install on the drive and I don't want to dual-boot the system.
Since one APFS partition is now mandatory for the System Partition, I would like to meet the mandatory requirement. I don't see why the rest of the system cannot have one or more discrete HFS+ partitions for user data and applications.
- Late 2014 Mac Mini, I've replaced the OEM HDD with another HDD with spinny platters and size of 1 TB.
- The main reason I'm avoiding APFS is there's reports of high fragmentation on traditional HDDs. SSD fragmentation isn’t an issue like HDD and my concern is eventual slow down.
- There's also been reports of major bugs, loss of utilities Apple and 3rd party.
- I played around with 10.14 and 10.15 with one APFS only partition and didn't like it. I'd tolerate it only as one smaller system-only APFS partition.
- Also APFS Copy-on-Write issues are not clearly documented
I don't think this was adequately tested and other OSes still allow older file systems to be used on install. Its beyond me HFS+ would be removed from the installer outright.
HDD Volume Partition1 > OSX System Volume > 60 GB (I think Big Sur installer says 20 GB is minimum)
Parttition2 > HFS+
Partition 3 > HFS+
Would the above Partition layout work?