I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.
I don't think APFS was designed or tuned with HDDs in mind, but it will work just fine. Especially for backups where random read/write performance is not important.
It's the iOSsification of macOS. Apparently, newer macBooks will now have touchscreen too ... once iPad OS and macOS are fully merged into OneMacOStoRuleThemAll, they'll finally lock down the bootloader on all Macs (why do you want to install anything else other an Apple OS?) and force all software install only through the App Store.
Apple software updates are always a downgrade. It's an opportunity to abuse customers that Apple just can't resist. If you're lucky all they do is break your muscle memory by moving buttons pointlessly.
Not GP, but: I had replaced the battery on my M1 Max 6mo ago with an aftermarket part. On MacOS 26 that routinely gave about 5 hours of coding/browsing/active screen time (no audio or massive CPU load other than unit test runs).
Anecdotally, after updating to MacOS 27 2mo ago that time has been reduced by between a third and a half, doing the same kind of daily work on the exact same project, without major new apps installed or new always-open browser tabs.
I don’t know if it’s the OS’s fault directly or the fault of an app I use that interacts poorly with the new OS’s power management, but either one is damning. I’m not doing anything particularly weird.
I've replaced the battery earlier this year. With Sequoia I get about 14 hours of use (browsing with firefox, emails with thunderbird, youtube, spotify, apple pages and numbers). Last year when I "downgraded" to tahoe, my battery life was effectively halfed and returned to normal when I upgraded back to Sequoia. Same thing is true with GG this year.
According to the Wikipedia article about CoreStorage, it seems like the primary/only use case was Fusion drives (hybrid SSD/HDD hardware).
The article says “It renders your expensive storage hardware completely useless.” but I’m really curious what that hardware could actually be. This seems like a pretty dead technology.
I've gotta agree. I'm not sure what expensive storage hardware would be both relevant today and unable to migrate off CoreStorage. For example, my most expensive storage is a NAS with an iSCSI target, and it couldn't care less what blocks I write to it. If I had a CoreStorage setup on it, I could migrate the data to a new target and then reuse that space for something else. The hardware wouldn't mind, or even know, that I'd changed what's on it.
You mentioned old, obsolete Fusion drives. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else where that'd matter, so you're probably right about that. AFAIK you can reformat those to use something other than CoreStorage if you're actually stuck using those boat anchors.
Sidebar, but as an end user, I remain annoyed that there isn't seemingly something that's a worthy successor to fusion drives.
Like I have an Unraid box with dual NVMe (RAID1) as the "cache" drive and a bunch of spinning disks as the "array", but it's also very manual, like torrents get downloaded first to cache and then a nightly job syncs them to the array. Feels like a real missed opportunity to not be able to have this kind of config transparently managed.
I have one of those in an ageing late 2009 27" iMac running Linux. It is a Seagate ST2000DX001-1CM1, a 2TB "SSHD" which comes down to having 8 GB of NAND storage bolted on to a conventional 2TB drive. It doesn't need any special driver to do its thing so I wonder what that CoreStorage bit is supposed to be about.
Did you install that SSHD as an aftermarket upgrade? I thought the Fusion Drive configurations shipped by Apple used normal hard drives and separate SSDs and were purely software-managed (and also used much more than 8GB of flash).
Apple sold iMacs for many years that had a completely separate SSD and HDD, and CoreStorage was used to combine them into a single block device which was then partitioned and formatted as HFS+ or APFS.
It doesn't really do everything that a real LVM does though. This was used to support those annoyingly bad Fusion Drives. They dropped them around 2020 I think.
I posted ~7 months ago about my decision to use HFS+ for backups, and had a couple skeptical replies. (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47317123)
I guess I misjudged Apple's commitment to support HFS+ long-term.
It now seems like there's no real native way of doing encrypted backups to HDDs on macOS (APFS not really recommended for HDDs)... the options are either encrypted Time Machine to a network location, or a third-party tool.
Guess I'll figure out SuperDuper or Carbon Copy.
Erm... it was dropped in macOS 26 back in 2025 ?
https://www.techspot.com/news/108394-usb-killer-dead-apple-d...
Anecdotally, after updating to MacOS 27 2mo ago that time has been reduced by between a third and a half, doing the same kind of daily work on the exact same project, without major new apps installed or new always-open browser tabs.
I don’t know if it’s the OS’s fault directly or the fault of an app I use that interacts poorly with the new OS’s power management, but either one is damning. I’m not doing anything particularly weird.
Because it isn't LVM, and giving it the same name as another similar-but-distinct technology would just make matters more confusing.
The article says “It renders your expensive storage hardware completely useless.” but I’m really curious what that hardware could actually be. This seems like a pretty dead technology.
You mentioned old, obsolete Fusion drives. I'm having a hard time thinking of anything else where that'd matter, so you're probably right about that. AFAIK you can reformat those to use something other than CoreStorage if you're actually stuck using those boat anchors.
Like I have an Unraid box with dual NVMe (RAID1) as the "cache" drive and a bunch of spinning disks as the "array", but it's also very manual, like torrents get downloaded first to cache and then a nightly job syncs them to the array. Feels like a real missed opportunity to not be able to have this kind of config transparently managed.
It manages logical volumes. Any quibbling is a matter of degree.