Why it is worth Resizing Mac Partitions

One of the most important needs of Mac users is resizing hard drive partitions for meeting their space requirements. All Mac photography freaks, who tend to separate their photos onto a dedicated disk partition, have increasing space requirements for accommodating their ever-growing image or media library. When you initially partition your Mac OS X drive, you tend to divide the overall drive space equally among all the partitions or choose a desired size for each partition according to your first requirements. As you begin filing the hard drive with data, the space on anyone of the drive partitions may get depleted. In such cases, you will need more room for storing new data. Thus, the task of resizing partitions is an integral part of partition management on any platform.

In Mac OS X, Disk Utility allows for easy and smooth resizing of existing volumes on the hard drive without any risk of data loss. With Disk Utility, you can quickly expand a partition or increase the size of a volume. However, Disk Utility has a limitation. You can increase the size of a volume only if there is sufficient free space between the volume to be expanded and the adjacent or next partition on the drive.

There is another way of resizing partitions in Mac. This is specifically beneficial to all the command-line lovers. You can use Terminal to perform a job much faster than in the regular interface. You can change the size of any partition on your internal hard drive or on any external disk attached to your system. To accomplish this job, you can run ‘resizeVolume’ command from Terminal. The ‘resizeVolume’ command is a function of ‘diskutil’. You need to type the following in Terminal:

‘diskutil resizeVolume’

However, this method also has a downside. The command can be only used with a GPT partitioned disk having journaled Hierarchical File System Plus (HFS+) file system on an Intel-based Mac. This type of formatting is default for all hard disks of any Intel Mac.

You can seek professional software to resize Mac partitions if any of the above methods fail to accomplish the desired task. With these advanced tools, you can easily expand a partition even if no free space is available between this partition and its neighboring partitions (provided the hard drive has enough free space to accommodate the resize). This is usually done by shifting partitions. Furthermore, these utilities support both Intel-based Macs and PowerPCs.