

The difference is that volumes can be created within the same partition and are much easier to manage. On Catalina and later (with APFS file system), Apple recommends you to create separate volumes instead. On all macOS versions before Catalina (running HFS+ file system), you have to partition your hard drive. The first thing to know about how to partition Mac hard drive is that there are now actually two different options available to you. Let’s explore what it takes to partition hard drives on your Mac, how to partition external hard drives, how to format a hard drive for Mac, and a few extra partitioning tips and tricks.

In fact, all the recent Macs already come with partitioned hard drives, since they contain a secret boot drive with the macOS Recovery System and a few other essential utilities that help you fix your Mac when there’s a critical problem.

Effectively, partitioning gives you two computers in one. Partitioning is basically a way to divide your hard drive into separate containers that don’t really interact with each other and can coexist without any interference. So you could have a beta version of a new macOS running alongside your stable one, or even a completely different operating system like Windows. The most common reason for trying to partition Mac hardrive has always been the ability to install two operating systems on the same computer at once. How to partition an external hard drive for Mac and Windowsįor years, trying to partition hard drives was something that only the most technical Mac users could do.If you don’t want to proceed with partitioning the disk, click Cancel.Īfter the operation finishes, click Done.Īfter you partition a storage device, an icon for each volume appears in both the Disk Utility sidebar and the Finder sidebar.Tackle your tasks with Setapp app suite solutions.

If you want to proceed with partitioning the disk, click Continue. If a dialogue appears that indicates it will take a long time to resize the startup volume, read the information in the dialogue, then do one of the following: Read the information in the Partition Device dialogue, then click Partition. Type a name for the volume in the Name field.įor MS-DOS (FAT) and ExFAT volumes, the maximum length for the volume name is 11 characters.Ĭlick the Format pop-up menu, then choose a file system format.Įnter the size or drag the resize control to increase or decrease the size of the volume. Note: If you click Add Volume instead, you can click the Add button to create an additional APFS volume in the container, or click Cancel to return to the Disk Utility window without making any changes to the storage device.
