Nowadays many users are convenient in carrying their important data within an external hard drive. However, most external hard drive users like to store their data in an organized manner. So in order to keep the data in a systematized way you will have to partition the external hard drive. It has been noticed that many users do not even know that the external hard drive can be partitioned into logical volumes, so they stick with the only partition which is provided by the vendor.
How to partition external hard drive on Mac?
The hard drive when purchased will at times come with some special drive management application within, which facilitates you to perform drive partitioning and other necessary actions. However, usage of this application is not recommended much but unless if the hard drive uses some exceptional multi-disk RAID options. Nevertheless, the Mac computer comes with a special application called a Disk utility, which is sufficient for managing the external drive.
Disk Utility is an inbuilt utility provided for Mac users which allows you to easily perform format, erase or resizing of partition, create partitions, setup RAID configuration, and many other stuffs. Meanwhile, before making use or performing any activity with Disk Utility ensure that you have some prior knowledge about the configuration settings and other details because a single mistake can cause huge damage to your data.
Note: Before performing the below-mentioned steps make sure there is no important data residing in your external hard drive because while partitioning the drive you will lose entire data from the drive.
Interesting Read: how to avoid fragmentation of hard drive?
Steps to partition external hard drive on Mac:
To set up the external hard drive for the first time, Connect the External hard drive to your Mac computer, open the Disk Utility, and perform the following steps
- Navigate through the following to open the Disk Utility
Application > Utility folder > Disk Utility
- Select the external hard drive which you have connected to perform partitioning, this can be done by selecting the drive from the left-hand side pane of the disk utility
- Click on the “Partition” tab from the main window
- Select “Options” button, fix the partition scheme to GUID and click on “OK” button
- Under “Volume Scheme” option select the number of partitions you desire to have
- If the external hard drive is used only with the Mac based computers then make sure that you set Apple's Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) format under “Format” option
- Subsequently provide information regarding “Name” and “Size” of the partition
- Repeat the above two steps for each partition if you are creating more than one partition; by this, every partition will have name, format, and size related information
- When you are sure about the information that you have provided, then click on the “Apply” button and save the changes
After performing the above steps, make sure everything is correct, test the drive, and if it works correctly, then your external hard drive is ready for use. However, this operation is not simple in spite of much guidance; thus, if you incorrectly perform the partitioning process, then this may lead to a huge loss of data. If you have come across such data loss, then you can make use of Remo Recover (Mac) to recover your entire external hard drive data on all available Mac OS X versions. This application is very user-friendly in recovering any type of data from a Mac hard disk in a few steps. Moreover, you can make use of this application to recover photos from MacBook, MacBook Air, etc.
If you want to run multiple OS on Mac. Follow this article to learn how to create a partition on Mac to run multiple OS.
