APFS vs Mac OS Extended (Journaled) for external HDD Which one between APFS and Mac OS Extended (Journaled) works better as partition store type for an external HDD (Magnetic Storage) that will be accessed over USB from macOS only?
APFS is known to not perform well on spinning disk drives (non SSDs).

Developer of Carbon Copy Cloner:
An analysis of APFS enumeration performance on rotational hard drives | Carbon Copy Cloner | Bombich Software

OWC/MacSales (who probably know more about Mac hardware than some people who work for Apple:
Using APFS On HDDs ... And Why You Might Not Want To