82 Macworld • January 2022MACOS MONTEREY
menu, select Utilities, and then in the
window that appears, double-click
the Disk Utility icon. The tool displays
details and a graph of your hard drive
configuration, showing the overall
capacity as well as the used and free
space and the various volumes.
To dig up more information on
your drive, click the Info icon at the
top. The window that pops up displays
a host of details, including the OS
name and version, file system, drive
connection type, encryption status,
and much more.
Before we go further, a quick
primer on the Mac’s file system. With
macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Apple
replaced the old HFS+ format with
APFS (Apple File System). AFPS
offers certain benefits, including
faster performance, greater reliability,and space sharing. With space
sharing, a single APFS container or
partition can dynamically allocate
space as needed to different volumes.
Now let’s say you want to
organize your physical drive into
different sections, maybe one for
your operating system, a second one
for your personal files, and a third
for your work-related files. You can
certainly set up multiple partitions.
(A partition is a specific segment of
space on your Mac’s storage device.)
But if you opt to use volumes instead,
your free space is allocated among
them on the fly.
To create a new volume, select any
existing volume on the left and click
the ‘+’ sign for the Volume icon at the
top. Change the name from Untitled
to something specific and click Add.
When the
process is
finished,
click Done.
Next, you
may want
to change
the name of
an existing
volume.
To do this,
right-click on
The Disk Utility main user interface. the volume,