Monday, 27 August 2012

Why and How to partition a Mac hard drive?

Do you have a single partition on your Mac hard drive? If yes, then it is time to partition the hard drive for its effective and safe use. Partitioning the hard drive will provide many advantages over a single partition hard drive.

Pros of making partition on hard drive are:

Multiple OS installation:
In single partition you can install only one operating system, so creating partition will facilitate you to install more than one OS. You can install as many operating system as much the number of partitions.

Easy Troubleshooting:
If you have encountered any problem with the Mac then troubleshooting will be easier and effective in multi-partition hard drive. Checking of the individual partitions will provide the good view of the problem on your Mac. You can easily Verify and Repair Mac volumes separately.

Protection of data in the event of OS corruption:
If anyhow due to any reason like virus, malware, deletion of system files, etc. operating system gets corrupted and then the data in the volumes other than the boot volume will be safe. There is no need to format the data in the other volumes, you just need to reinstall the OS to fix the problem.

Easy searching of data:
Searching will be easy in case of multi-partition drive environment because we have prior idea about the saved location of the particular files. It will be a lot easier if we search in that particular volume only. The same can be a tiring task if we have to look out for a file in one large Mac hard drive.

Cloning and organization of data or volume will be easy:
It is obvious that we need less time and effort to organize small data effectively as compared the large amount of data. We can also clone volumes having important data inspite of making clone of the whole hard drive as it will be very time and memory consuming.

These all reasons counts to the benefits of creating partitions on the hard drive. Partition can be created either at the time of OS installation or if you want to create partition in the installed system then it can be done by a third-party partition manager tool.

Partition operations can also be done using disk utility but it has some cons like it cannot shift partitions and cannot hide and reveal partition. To fulfill my partition needs I took help of the following software http://alternativeto.net/software/stellar-partition-manager/about.