When you bring home a new Mac notebook or desktop computer, the hard drive comes with a single large volume. Some of the hard drives come pre-initialized in the factory, whereas in case of others you need to initialize them. In case of one single partition in the hard drive, you have to install the OS and store data into the same volume. This makes the corresponding volume a mess, which you can avoid making multiple partitions in the drive. For the purposes of partition creation, deletion, formatting and resizing, there are many Mac partition manager utilities available in the current software market.
Your physical Mac hard drive contains a single large logical volume. If you start storing all your data in the same volume, all categories of files will get messed up and it may be difficult to access a particular file, when required. If you have a hard drive of some TB size, then you can easily imagine the trouble. Moreover, in case of a single large volume; if there will be any instance of data loss following corruption, accidental deletion or formatting, the loss will be more.
These are the reasons, for which it is suggested to create multiple partitions in the hard drive and store different categories of data separately. Apart from partition creation, there are other partition related tasks, such as formatting, deletion, increase/decrease partition size etc.
As data deletion as well as formatting is the methods to remove unwanted files and applications from the hard drive, there are times, when you need to format Mac partitions and store data afresh. Similarly, sometimes due to virus/malware infection, file system corruption, operating system malfunction, or conflict with recently installed hardware/software, the Mac partitions get corrupt.
Though you can take the help of Disk Utility to repair the corrupt partitions and recover inaccessible data; at times the corruption becomes intense and Disk Utility fails. In such situations, even the partitions can not be formatted and you do not have any other choice other than deleting the corresponding partition completely.
Similarly, there are occasions, when you want to increase or decrease the size of a partition. For all such partition related operations, including creation, deletion, formatting or resizing of partitions, Disk Utility has options in it. However, many new users, who do not have much technical knowledge, find Disk Utility difficult to operate and want a friendlier Mac partition manager utility to perform the operations.
These Mac utilities are specially designed to help users in managing their Mac partitions efficiently. Along with effective means of managing Mac partitions, these utilities come with highly interactive graphical user interfaces, which provide an easy experience.
Bio: Vishal is a Mac owner and a data recovery specialist who expertise in recovering lost, formated data from a Mac OS X drive. You can download a free partition manager for Mac OS X.