Use Disk Utility to Create an APFS ContainerĬontainers are only supported on drives formatted with APFS. The smaller container houses a single volume, and the larger container holds two volumes.) (The selected drive shows that it contains two containers of different sizes. Volumes you create in a container can have a minimum size and a maximum size, but the actual amount of space they use is dynamically assigned from the container’s free space, as each volume within the container needs the space.
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Related article: How to Revert a drive from APFS back to HFS+Ĭontainers, then, define a block of space on a physical drive that will be assigned to and used by volumes you create in the container. It allows volumes that are within a common container to grow or shrink as needed, without any type of repartitioning. If you need to partition and manage standard HFS+ volumes, you’ll find detailed instructions in the Rocket Yard guide: How to Use macOS Sierra Disk Utility to Partition, Erase Drives.Ĭontainers are a new abstract used in the APFS system to define a storage system that can share available free space among one or more volumes. We’re going to look at how to use Disk Utility to partition drives into multiple containers, and how to add volumes to containers. With the advent of APFS (Apple File System) with macOS High Sierra, Disk Utility acquired some additional capabilities that allow it to work with APFS and its support for containers. Disk Utility has long been the workhorse of choice for dealing with hard drives, SSDs, and disk images.