[Avid-L2] APFS VS. HFS+?

I GOT A 24TB OWC RAID drive and I hooked it up USB 3 to my Mid 2012 12 Core 3.46GHz MacPro.  It burped 3/4s of the way through a DPX export.  Then I tried to ama link to the DPX folder and Avid spun for an extended time processing the media.  I rebooted twice and then just tried to view the DPX folder contents on the desktop.  Again it took an amazing amount of time spinning but nothing ever displayed.  I found out the drive was formatted APFS not my usual HFS+.  I understand my OS 10.12.6 handles APFS but it seems to be problematic.  I also don't like these OWC enclosures as I found them to be much slower exporting DPX to them than a comparable Graid.  The Graids were out of stock so here I am.

I mounted the OWC on a 2013 iMac with High Sierra and it did display the contents of the DPX folder fairly quickly but then I highlighted the DPX folder and did get info and now 5 minutes later it's still chunking along.  I read that the APFS is geared to improve performance in SSDs but still works with spinning drives.  So on the iMac did it display the contents relatively fast because of the advantages of APFS?  I read it had a different metadata structure that made this better.  But then why does the get info on the same folder just hangup and take soooo long?  I'm pushing on 10 minutes and still no info?

I'm just going to offload the OWC contents and reformat to HFS+ to level my normal playing field but I'm not clear why I should have to do this or if it will help.  Some googling said it takes APFS longer to copy files but others say it improves performance.  I know our upload facility had some problems with drives formatted on High Sierra so I now assume that was because they were formatted to APFS the new default format for initializing drives in High Sierra.

Anybody have experience good or bad with APFS.  I did learn that it will only work on Sierra and later OSs so that's a reason not to use it in a communal environment but what about performance comparisons and how is it more efficient fos SSDs?

John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@pacbell.net