[Ham-Mac] Why Partition vs. Erase a SATA hard drive?

[Carl Makin]

Hi Dick,

On Tue, 2 Aug 2005, Dick Kriss, AA5VU wrote:

> Stay tuned for the response from SIIG regarding their manual that says to
> use the Partition function.  I talked to an Apple tech who said he always
> uses the Partition function for new drives but he could not remember why he
> uses Partition vs. Erase.

Using the partition function rewrites the partition information to the
disk and then formats the partition.  This would get around any problems
with the partition info possibly being corrupt, or incompatible (old
version?).  The erase function just reformats the partition without
rewriting or updating the partition information.

If you were working with an old disks partitioned pre-MacOS X then it
might be a good idea to use partition otherwise it shouldn't matter
(Although it won't hurt).

Be careful with the partition function though if you have an external disk
with existing partitions that you want to keep.  The Apple Disk Utility
has limitations in how it can partition drives.  For example I have a
120Gb disk partitioned as two 60Gb volumes, the first being DOS, the
second HFS+.  Disk Utility wouldn't let me do that and I had to do it on
my FreeBSD box.  Once partitioned though, it works fine on the iMac.


Carl.