hard drive low level partition program for mac

Each volume can have a separate formatting scheme. When you format a disk, you partition it into one or more logical volumes.

(GUID refers to a globally unique identifying code that’s part of the formatting standard.) Apple supports multiple styles of formatting, though its preferred one for Macs is called GUID Partition Table. However, the physical disk is useless without being formatted or prepared to store the data in a particular way that an operating system can read. The name the maker assigns to a disk drive appears in Disk Utility. (Only a handful of firms make hard drives.) Depending on the vintage of Mac you have and other factors, the drive’s name might start with Apple or might start with the hard-drive maker’s company name. In my 2014 Mac mini, I have a drive labeled “APPLE HDD HTS541010A9E662 Media.” When I search for the product number, I come up with “Hitachi 1TB SATA 2.5 Hard Drive,” the manufacturer’s name for the drive. The “Hitachi” part Carmela encountered is the manufacturer’s name for the physical drive as assigned at the factory. It’s a physical medium that has a disk controller that mediates access to data stored on the disk, including carrying out and tracking the details of what bits are written where, and how to retrieve them later. While this may be old hat for veteran users, it’s just jargon for those who have never had to format a drive before.Ī drive is a physical thing, whether it’s a hard disk drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD). What Carmela is seeing is the difference between a drive and a partition.

iOS obviously goes a few steps further, mostly preventing even advanced users from seeing much of what’s under the hood. This highlights how well Apple typically hides some of the fussy details of an operating system from users, usually to the good: most of the time, we don’t need to know any low-level details in order to use a Mac. I wanted to restore it to factory settings, but while erasing the disk I erased not only “Macintosh HD” but the “Hitachi…” What have I done? I reinstalled the OS fine. Carmela writes in with a question after wiping a 2010 MacBook Pro and reinstalling macOS:

Hard drive low level partition program for mac