Just trying to confirm something… just got a flash drive (gotta say 256G for 23 bucks is amazing). Can’t format as APFS. Plugged into one of the front ports. My backup SSD, plugging into a Thunderbolt port was abe to format as APFS. Plugged the flash drive in to a Thunderbolt port and can’t do APFS. So I’m thinking the port makes no difference, it’s the device itself, True? Interesting.
Tried running the BackMagic disk tester. Mmmm, not so hot, about 60 write, 145 read. Supposed to be USB Gen 3.1, Are these correct?
What is your intended usage. You might be better with FAT32 format.
Your speed results are about right for a flash drive. Compared with an SSD (or even HDD) they are a) slow, and b) have limited life in terms of writes. Cheap for a reason, but nice and compact.
As @gilby101 wrote, flash drives come in all sizes and speeds. The cheap ones are pretty slow - comparable to floppy disks, not to SSDs.
As for why you can’t format it as APFS, I’m assuming it’s due to the partition type. These devices come pre-formatted and pre-partitioned from the factory. I would assume something smaller than 2TB to be partitioned as MBR and formatted as FAT. Some (especially very small ones) might not have a partition table at all, meaning there is only one volume that consumes the entire device.
macOS can only create an APFS container (which contains APFS volumes) on a device with a GUID partition table.
I personally would recommend using HFS+ (Mac OS Extended) on a slow device (or FAT if you want to use it with Windows and Linux devices). I think APFS will hurt your already-slow performance.
But if you want to give it a try, you should be able to use Disk Utility to change the device’s partition type. Note that you may have to pick View → Show All Devices from the menu-bar in order to see your physical devices. By default, it only shows volumes, but you need to erase the whole device in order to change the partition table type.
Use is for additional backups of my files. I think those front ports claim 10GB/s, so I think they are 3.2, but not 3.2 gen 2. The drive is 3.1 and claims 1024MB/s speeds. But 80/145? Something seems out of whack here.Then again, not really a big deal because after I copy a bunch of stuff to it, it will be kinda retired, it will have all my stuff (or most of it I should say, room to put my Music & Video folder, but not all my pictures), so there will be no reading and writing.
In other words, most are really slow devices, and there’s no way any of them come anywhere close to “1024 GB/s”.
I’d say that your 145/60 device for $23 was a pretty good deal (assuming it doesn’t trash your data - some el-cheapo ones may do that). But if you want high performance, you’ll need to buy an SSD.
You da man David! I got a SanDisk 256GB Ultra Dual Drive USB Type-C. I looked more carefully at it’s product page and they do say 150MB/s. I’ll have to ferret out where I saw those 1024 claims… I just know I saw them. When I re-tested it, got 80/145. Somehow I was expecting a bit more, like 400 or so. But it is what it is.
I DO have this Crucial 2T X9 external, thing is very tiny. It does my CCC backup. I have my “stuff” in 5 places now, my old boot drive, the clone I ran on my Mac Pro, the M4, the backup to the Crucial drive and now the SanDisk flash drive. Chances are slim that I might ever totally lose something.
Yeah I forgot about the partition table, when I went to format it, I did not see a choice for partition table.
The factory-default configuration from Apple has Disk utility only showing volumes. But for partitioning or changing the partition table, you need to modify the device. To make it show the devices, select “Show All Devices” from the menu-bar (red box in my screen shot).
To work on the device, you need to select the device from the left-side column (blue box) and not any of its volumes (orange box).
If you click the “Erase” button with the device selected, you are presented with options that lets you specify the partition table scheme:
The most important thing here is that you can only create APFS volumes/containers if the device’s partition scheme is “GUID Partition Map”.
If the device has a partition table, the “Partition” button will let you create/delete/resize partitions if you need/want more than one: