Partitioning External Drive

The storage space of the main hard drive of your Mac system is not always enough and gradually you need more space to store data. External hard drives fulfill these needs by providing ample space. Basically, these external hard drives are used as backup drives, where you can keep all your important data safe. You can create different drive partitions into your external media and store documents, photos, audios, videos, movies etc. in an organized manner.

When you purchase a new external hard drive, you can not just start storing data onto it. Your brand new external hard drive comes as a core drive, which has no file system installed on it. File system in the media keeps data in a human readable hierarchical organization and helps in easy manipulation by the computer's operating system. Mac has several file systems, such as HFS, HFS+, HFS Wrapper etc. and before working with Mac OS X, you need to format your new external hard drive with any of these Mac supported file systems.

The new external hard drive first needs to be initialized (or formatted). Once the hard drive gets initialized, you can make separate partitions or volumes of varied size using different file systems. Below steps will guide you through the process:

Partitioning External Hard Drive using Disk Utility:
• Open the 'Application' folder and select 'Disk utility' from the 'Utilities' menu.
• All the attached drives to the system, including your new hard drive get listed in the left side column. Select the new hard drive from the list and click the 'Partition' tab.
• Set the value of 'Volume Scheme' as 'Current'.
• Click the +(plus sign) or -(minus sign) in order to add or remove the partitions. You can also assign name and file system to each partition.
• Click 'Apply' to make the partitions as specified.

At times, new Mac users do not feel comfortable using Disk Utility for partitioning their hard drives and want some graphical user interface based applications to the job. This is where with highly interactive graphical user interfaces

Stellar Phoenix Partition Manager Software provides the ease of usage. This is an immensely useful utility to Create, Format, Resize and Delete partitions on your Mac system. The software works both on Intel as well as PowerPC based Mac systems and creates partition by automatically detecting the type (whether PowerPC or Intel) of the hard drive.

Stellar Partition Manager has been designed with highly interactive graphical user interfaces, from where you just need to choose your External Drive to be initialized and the size of the partitions, you want to make. The tasks get added in the 'Tasks to do' list of the software and once you hit the 'Add' button; the partitions are made as specified by you. The software is pretty simple and you can use it without even any further assistance.