Partition Hard Disks
If you're using hard drives for backups, you may want to partition the disks. (To decide on partition sizes, review Does Size Matter? earlier.)
Note
Super important! If you'll be using Time Machine, you must follow this procedure, even if you want to end up with only one partition, for disks over 512 GB in size. Such disks were likely partitioned at the factory using the Master Boot Record (MBR) scheme, and Apple's Mac OS Extended format (also known as HFS+) doesn't support MBR-partitioned volumes larger than 512 GB.
To partition a hard disk:
After connecting the drive, launch Disk Utility.
From the list on the left, select the hard disk you want to partition (if a disk has multiple icons, select the topmost, non-indented icon), ...
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