format and partition external hard drive mac

Use Boot Campīoot Camp is especially useful if you want to run Windows on your Mac. How to partition a hard drive or SSD on Mac

We recommend downloading CleanMyMac X, a powerful Mac cleaner, ideal for decluttering your Mac before creating a partition. Between old folders and documents, images and videos, apps taking up space, hundreds of email attachment downloads and local iOS backups, many people find they have at least 62GB of junk they simply don't need. Most users find they have way more clutter and junk than they think. What to do before partitioning a hard driveīefore going ahead with a partition, it’s always useful to tidy your Mac up.

Although, if you want to use the other volume to run an earlier version of your Mac - which you can, using Time Machine, the volume for that side has to be twice as large as the space it requires. Once you know how to partition a hard drive on Mac, or how to partition an external hard drive on Mac, you can format and manage them separately, effectively giving you two computers within one. Each disk drive, with its own volume, is found and treat separately in the Finder. Or you can run two versions of the same OS in both sides of the partition, all from a single disk. One of the main reasons for implementing a partition is to run more than one operating system, such as macOS on one and Windows on the other. Benefits of making a partition in a Mac hard drive In all fairly recent models, the boot drive contains a secret partition that includes the macOS Recovery System, some essential Mac first aid tools and an installer, should, for any reason, your macOS fail to install or reboot.īefore we go into how to partition a Mac hard drive or SSD, let’s consider the benefits, and what you would need to do before partitioning a hard drive. One thing you may not know is that the Mac boot drive is already partitioned.

How you use it depends how quickly, or not, that space fills up and whether you need to add more space - either internally (such as upgrading to an SSD), or connecting to one or more external hard drives.

Mac computers, whether you have an iMac, MacBook Pro, MacBook Air, or another Mac device, all have a finite amount of space. But to help you do it all by yourself, we’ve gathered our best ideas and solutions below.įeatures described in this article refer to the MacPaw site version of CleanMyMac X. So here's a tip for you: Download CleanMyMac to quickly solve some of the issues mentioned in this article.

Format and partition external hard drive mac