So, if you have ever wondered how to partition a hard drive on Mac you’ve landed at the right spot. Want to how to format your external hard drive? No matter how much space any device has, we still crave for some extra gigabytes—one can never get enough of it! How to partition second hard drive. You can upgrade your Mac’s hard drive in two ways—either you can upgrade it internally via SSD or by connecting your Mac to an external hard drive. Whether it’s your Mac, iPhone or any other device, they all come with a specific finite amount of space which sooner or later gets occupied with our personal data.

OS X’s Disk Utility—which enables you to format, partition, repair, and perform other kinds of maintenance on disks (including SSDs, flash drives, and disk images)—is good for what it does. Yet for many years conventional wisdom held that you also needed at least one third-party disk repair utility on hand to solve the problems Disk Utility couldn’t. Does that advice still make sense? Disk utilities claim to be able to fix problems involving a volume’s directory, which keeps track of where all your files and folders are.

(Directory damage, perhaps the most common type of disk error, can produce symptoms such as missing or inaccessible files, applications that won’t launch, and startup problems.) Most of these tools can also repair a partition map, which is a chunk of data that describes how data is to be stored on a disk; and many can repair certain kinds of errors with individual files, too (such as damaged preference files). Regardless of those details, when your disk is misbehaving, you probably don’t care if you have an invalid B-tree node size or an overlapped extent allocation; you just want the symptoms to go away. I’ve personally had numerous disk problems that Disk Utility tried but failed to fix, displaying a scary error message that read: “Error: Disk Utility can’t repair this disk.

CleanMyMac’s Uninstaller utility is a good alternative to Windows Uninstaller that helps you to If there’s ever an issue, CleanMyMac will help you find out exactly what’s happening and how to fix it Memory Clean can be downloaded from the Mac App Store for free. All of the apps mentioned above. Sep 18, 2018 - Stop your Mac getting bogged down with useless files and memory hogging applications. We show you the best cleanup utility apps for macOS.

Back up as many of your files as possible, reformat the disk, and restore your backed-up files.” On these occasions, I was grateful to have more powerful tools available. Many such disk-repair apps exist, but the big three are Alsoft’s ($100), Prosoft Engineering’s ($99), and Micromat’s ($100).

Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time. Lately I’ve noticed something curious: While I used to turn to such utilities every few months, I haven’t had to do so in a long time—certainly not in the past couple of years. Anecdotal evidence suggests that I’m not alone in this; disk errors beyond the purview of Disk Utility seem to have declined sharply.

One reason is that Apple has made ongoing hardware and software improvements that keep disks running happily more of the time. OS X performs certain disk maintenance tasks automatically in the background—for example, it defragments smaller files on the fly, keeping all their segments contiguous on a hard disk so they’ll load faster. (Solid-state drives don’t require such defragging.) And, when you perform a safe boot (starting your Mac with the Shift key held down), OS X runs a more extensive set of diagnostic and repair procedures without you doing anything else. I credit these and other improvements to OS X with the reduced frequency of disk errors. In addition, Disk Utility has gained a number of new features in recent years, and it can now repair faults that might once have been out of its reach. Whatever the reasons, I can tell you that my personal copies of DiskWarrior, Drive Genius, and TechTool Pro are all now several versions out of date, something I once would have found inconceivable. I’m asking myself, “Should I bother paying for upgrades?

Will I ever even use them?” If you find yourself asking similar questions, I have two answers for you. Disk utilities are a waste! As I look over the feature lists of the major disk utilities, I find it striking that they all advertise capabilities that Disk Utility already offers for free.

The three third-party programs can check a drive’s SMART (self-monitoring, analysis, and reporting technology) status, repair disk permissions, and repair at least some types of volume corruption. Drive Genius and TechTool Pro can create a bootable duplicate of your disk and securely erase free space, and Drive Genius can also initialize and format drives. But Disk Utility does all that, too. There's not much to do in DiskWarrior except to choose a disk and click Rebuild. But that solves most directory problems. Disk repair always requires you to start up from a separate volume. But as long as your Mac is running Lion or Mountain Lion, you don’t need a second drive; simply restart while holding -R to use OS X Recovery, which boots your Mac from a hidden partition (or, in some cases, over the Internet) so you can run Disk Utility.

The third-party utilities, by contrast, ship on bootable DVDs—except that they can’t boot the newest Mac models (not even if you use an external SuperDrive, for Mac models that lack an internal one). So in order to repair your startup disk, you’ll need to create a separate boot volume with the disk utility installed. (TechTool Pro’s eDrive is the sole exception here, behaving much like OS X’s Recovery HD.) So, for most repairs, OS X’s native tools seem to be at least equal to the competition. And even if you encounter an error Disk Utility can’t fix, you don’t necessarily need to buy another app. Thanks to Time Machine, Disk Utility’s Restore feature, and a host of third-party backup programs, more Mac users than ever have great backups.