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Reader Comment on “Storing Important Data on the Boot Drive is Asking For Trouble — Always Make a Separate Volume”
Related: all videos, APFS, hard drive, reader comment, Stephen S, videos by Lloyd
Stephen S writes:
I just discovered your website macperformanceguide.com; it is a real treasure. I just bookmarked it for additional reading.
In your comments on creating a separate volume in the Data portion of the Macintosh HD, it was interesting to contrast this with the advice given to me earlier in the day by a senior employee in an Apple-affiliated store. He said, in essence, we don’t use the word “volume” but instead “partition.” I told him I was setting up a new iMac running Sonoma (14.2) and that I had 0.7TB of research data in a parent volume that contained many subfolders of critical data collected over the last 20 years. I asked his advice— which offered nothing that sounded rational.
The fact that over all my years of computing, I have never seen another person organize files in a logical manner and I remain astounded by this, but given the low level advice I was given, it makes much sense.
Your article, Lloyd, needs to be presented in Mac User Groups and taught to those rendering help via Apple support. My question to you relates to the allocation of memory in the “Work” volume in the Data storage drive volume. I purchased the new iMac with a 2TB internal hard drive. After installing 95% of the apps I use, plus the operating system and miscellaneous files, what I have left is this:
<M3 hard drive composition.jpe>
When I add a volume using Disk Utility, do I need to allocate sizes in the window (i.e., Reserve Size and Quota Size?) Or will the OS determine this without my needing to define how much storage this particular new volume can allocate (e.g., 1.4TB) and how much do I need to leave in reserve (e.g., 0.17TB = 170GB).
Have I understood this correctly? Thanks for teaching us so much.
MPG: volume is the only word that works. It’s what you actually use. Partition is nerd talk, an implementation detail does not even exist for some volumes. Moreover a partition need not have a volume, it can be space set aside that cannot be used. So using “partition” really demonstrates a lack of understanding in multiple way.
APFS volumes are not partitions and that’s what makes them so attractive eg they share the space among volumes intead of balkanizing it as with partitions.
BTW, a partition need not have a volume (it would useless and invisible to the user).
Minor point: no Mac today has a hard drive any more, but Apple still makes the boot volume "Macintosh HD”. I just call mine “Boot” for “boot volume.
MPG: the video below shows (in part) how to create a separate volume on any drive including your internal SSD (boot drive). Make sure it is backed up with a minimumof two backups stored safely away from the computer—see external backup drives here.
