Disk Partitioning Software Recommendation...

[JoelBC]

Maybe you can find a friend who will loan you a drive while you take care of the first. Also, there really is no reason to partition APFS drives. You should use Volumes instead to keep data separate. Had you formatted the drive as APFS, with one Container holding five volumes, you wouldn't be in this predicament. (I'm sorry this sounds preachy. It's not my intent.)

Hmmm, I need a lesson here. Containers versus partitions; what is the difference between what you are suggestion (formatting the entire drive as APFS and the using containers) versus what I did by portioning the drive and formatting each partition as APFS?

Apologies for the possibly naive question but thank you in advance for the response.

 

[Fishrrman]

OP wrote:
"It appears part of the spacing problem I have is related to he use of 2.5" 5400rpm which are / can be problematic with APFS"

For platter-based hard drives that are used for data storage (only) and WILL NOT be used for booting or for time machine (or cloned) backups, DON'T use APFS.

Use HFS+ instead ("Mac OS extended, journaling enabled, GUID partition format").

APFS can severely fragment platter-based drives, and it can also cause excessive "disk thrashing" (you'll know what this is when you hear it).