Optimize Mac Performance by Managing Mac Partitions

When it comes to hard drive partitioning, the first thought that crosses your mind is data organization. This is perhaps the true significance of partitioning or splitting a hard drive into more than one logical storage units. Mac users, having a bulk of information stored on their OS X drives, are inclined to divide their drives into smaller slices, known as 'Partitions'. These partitions hold your operating system, program files, and data (including documents, music, pictures, etc.). One of the fundamental needs for OS X drive partitioning is to separate system and program files from user files.

Mac hard drive partitioning has a range of real-time benefits as illustrated below:

• Had there been a single partition on your Mac hard drive and you needed to reinstall OS X from scratch, you would have to compromise everything that is present on the drive, including documents, backups, databases, and more. With data and OS stored on two different partitions, you can safely perform the task without disturbing the partition containing your data.
• Partitioning is a good way to keep virus and malware attacks at bay. The viruses, who specifically target files on your system partition, will not affect your documents stored on a different partition.
• You can back up your data and operating system separately. You can create an image of your operating system on another partition. Using this image, you can restore the OS X quickly without having to reinstall it altogether.
• With OS X drive partitioned into two or more storage units, data access becomes faster.

Mac users can easily partition their OS X drives with the help of Apple's Disk Utility. Later versions of Disk Utility (from OS X 10.5) allows performing a range of partitioning operations on Mac hard drive without having to erase data that is already present on the drive. While Disk Utility ensures safe and error-free partitioning, there are a few downsides of using this tool. You cannot expand a partition, if there is no free space available between the partition you wish to resize and the next partition on the drive. Further, you need to boot from your OS X Install DVD to perform partitioning tasks on your boot volume.

To overcome all these limitations, you should take help of professional Mac partition manager software. With the help of these tools, a range of Mac partitioning jobs with ease, such as creating, deleting, resizing, and formatting Mac partitions. These utilities can efficiently shift partitions to allow utilising all scattered portions of free space on your OS X drive. Furthermore, they are compatible with Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion.