by If you’ve used a computer for any length of time you’ll be familiar with partition sizes, partition types during the setup phase but what about later on down the line? I’ve done it myself being overcautious or forgetting to create a spare one just for data. And so the search for Mac Partition manager brings us nicely onto this review.
Stellar Partition Manager
My review mac was a mess when I got it. The earlier user had formatted with the GUID partition table, I wanted to expand the disk, couldn’t and after an insane amount fo time I ended up trashing the hard drive and starting from scratch, creating 2 partitions that I thought “would be big enough”. As always my calculations were hopeless and thankfully Stellar Software offered us a trial of Stellar Partition Manager to get me out of this bind.
Most people will just need the basics and Stellar Partition Manager caters well for those types allowing you to:
- Create new Partitions
- Delete Partitions
- Roll back actions
- Format Partition
- Create a Bootable DVD (to work with your boot drive)
- Hide / Reveal Partitions
Partition managers can suffer from bloat overload or complex terms which make it all too easy to press a wrong option and so thankfully Stellar have stayed simple and some might say, slightly dated interface of their product range.
If you’re planning to do any partition style-based work on the boot volume of your Apple Mac you’ll be prompted to create a bootable DVD
Reszing your bootable mac volume : Bootable Partition Manager CD
Working with your boot drive will mean creating a boot cd and thankfully Stellar makes you well aware of this each time you click on a partition based on the boot drive. . There’s no need to worry about having the right drivers, formatting the disc correctly, as Stellar Partition Magic will prompt you to create a disk any time you click on a boot partition
The bootable version of Stellar Partition Manager For Mac looks pretty much the same as it’s desktop counterpart but obviously without all my desktop stuff cluttering up the place.
When you are ready to get down to resizing a partition it’s a simple matter of using grab handles to get the size you want. How long it takes to perform those tasks is down to your system. On my SSD 3 drive connected via USB 2 it was blisteringly fast. Those running hdd’s will find the experience a touch slower of course.
As you can see on the left there’s the task list of whats going to happen. Incidentally nothing does happen right up until you click that start button. Like all partition programs out there once you start there’s no going back
unfortunately the software does not allow merging partitions but that’s ok for this review as I’m looking to make 1 partition bigger by using the free space of the other*
So far all in all Stellar have produced something that works just fine but fora few small niggly issues that granted could just be an edge case for me.
That one small problem
Using a 1TB which was split evenly into 2 partitions, installing an OS I realised that it should have been 3. Alas you can’t split an active partition only create a new partition in the free space. If you only have a few gb or mb spare to create a new partition that might work but I did get an error message as shown above. How much of a deal breaker that is really depends on your case usage. The lesson here for the day is have a good think before doing anything with partition managers in general.
Overall Stellar Partition Manager Thoughts
It’s a small, neat, simple to use utility that helps out with managing hard drive partitions. I miss that ability to take a chunk of free space on an active partition and create something new instead of being limited to free space.
Stellar Partition Manager is available from Stellar Software priced at
1 Users Licence$39
3 Users Licence$79
3 Users Licence $129
and there’s also the 30 day money back guarantee
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