You won’t usually see this unless you run the Unix diskutil list from Terminal. Finally, there’s a third Volume the EFI Volume. As of macOS Lion, there is also an invisible Recovery Partition. Out of the box, it’s called Macintosh HD on the Desktop. The major one, booted from, is formatted as an HFS+ Volume and contains the operating system (macOS) and the user data. Most Macintosh disks have three Partitions and one is the boot Volume. How does all that appear to me as a Mac user? Partitions that aren’t formatted may not be visible to the OS. When macOS recognizes the file system, it can mount it (make it visible in the Finder). For example, HFS+, APFS, NTFS (Windows), or EXT4 (Linux). A disk can have one or more Partitions, each with a fixed size (prior to High Sierra.) A Partition must be formatted and mounted before macOS can see it and read/write data.Ī Volume is a Partition that has been formatted with a specific file system. And if you do practice, back up all your data and then experiment on a non-mission critical Mac to make sure you understand the fundamentals.Ī Partiton is a logically grouped, named portion of a disk that can hold data. It’s not intended as a step-by-step guide for direct experimentation. The FAQ starts with the classic (pre-APFS) usage, then explains the changes with APFS as it goes along.įinally, this FAQ is intended to clarify basic notions. The discussion is restricted to simple disks such as found in your Mac or typical external drives. Note, for simplicity here, a Hard Disk Drive (HDD) and A solid State Drive (SSD) will be referred to as a disk. Apple’s new file system, APFS, introduces a few wrinkles, so here’s a short, easy FAQ to help you make sense of it all.
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