Hey guys,
Hope y'all are doing marvellously well. So, I got a Samsung T7 1 TB external SSD for My Mac M1 running Ventura. Which format do you recommend I format the SSD to? It is in ExFAT currently. Here are are things I have in mind:

1) This is for my systems ONLY. For now, it is Mac M1 and future when I upgrade to newer macsONLY. It will NOT be used on any windows system or anybody else's Macs either.
2) Mainly used to store Kontakt, Serum,,,etc Libraries and I want the loading speeds from SSD to be OPTIMUM.

Please advise if I should format it to APFS or let it be ExFAT. I know the Pros and Cons of both. I just want y'all to give your opinion on what you'd do in this situation.

Do help me out, folks. Thanks in advance.

 

APFS.

Do not use exFAT for Macs, it's not a Mac filesystem and doesn't support many things your Mac files need.

 

1) ever planning to use it on old Mac, with system older than High Sierra?
if not, then APFS for sure
2) ever planning to use it on Windows?
if yes, then MBR + exFAT

T7 by default is compatible with both MacOS and Windows,
for your use case, definitely format it to APFS and never look back

 

This is from Troells the head honcho at 8dio:

“If your drive is formatted to APFS or ExFat, Kontakt won't be able to retrieve data fast enough from the drive and can cause Longer load times, Kontakt to hang or within a DAW setting and can cause Kontakt to crash. (Depending on the size of the instruments). This will only be a problem on larger libraries with big .nki files. What happens is Kontakt has to scan the folder you have selected and find every sample, which is not an issue for most libraries but for libraries that use a lot of large samples in a single .nki file you can run into some issues if the hard drive is not optimized for Kontakt.

- The most efficient format for Mac Users is Mac OS (Journaled)
- The most efficient format for Windows users is NTFS.”

 

apfs. But you really aren't going to notice much of a difference. Unless you are running a Mac to run benchmark tests and not make music with it. You have a fast machine.