Mac Hard Drives question

[rickstar3]

I have a macbook pro and am running Monterey 12.3.1.

My hard drive space is running out so I was trying to clean things up. I thought I had two 1TB hard drives so I was just planning on offloading a bunch of data onto the second hard drive. But it seems like the drives are connected somehow. I do have the -data system partition as well.

Can someone explain if I do have a second separate hard drive and if so, how can I use it?

I appreciate the help.

 

[MBAir2010]

to clear things up, please let us know what MacBook pro (m/chip-intel)
and the drive space that came with this laptop
having 6 volumes does not seem feasible storage wise,
but Im an intel mac user.
hopefully someone else here can solve this
i would unite the 6 volumes and just run 1.
again wait and see.

 

[mfram]

In the case of the OP, the "Hard Drive 2" looks like another volume on your APFS internal drive. It is not a separate 1TB of storage. It shares storage with your internal 1 TB drive. It is simply a separate storage area on your internal drive. You have 1 TB of internal storage total.

 

[rickstar3]

Thanks for the quick responce. mfram, that's what I was thinking. This used to be a video editing laptop so it may have been configured that way for their purposes.

Here is the basic system info if that means anything.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro16,1
Processor Name: 8-Core Intel Core i9
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Number of Processors: 1
Total Number of Cores: 8
L2 Cache (per Core): 256 KB
L3 Cache: 16 MB
Hyper-Threading Technology: Enabled
Memory: 64 GB
System Firmware Version: 1731.100.130.0.0 (iBridge: 19.16.14243.0.0,0)
OS Loader Version: 540.100.7~23

 

[HobeSoundDarryl]

I never had one but looks like what Apple called a Fusion drive to me- a little bit SSD and the bulk of it HDD... totaling 1TB together.

Your best solution is to buy yourself an external drive and "offload" to it. If the offload files are perceived to still be needed often, maybe get a big (capacity) USB stick drive or even a small SSD so you can plug it in when you need the offloaded files. Else, if you won't need the offloaded stuff much, a traditional HDD external will likely be cheap and relatively spacious. $50-$100 would probably buy you plenty of external storage if you were hoping for a spare 1TB. At about $100, you can get external HDD in the 4TB-5TB range... smaller/lighter SSD at about 1TB or so.

 

[joevt]

I never had one but looks like what Apple called a Fusion drive to me- a little bit SSD and the bulk of it HDD... totaling 1TB together.

If it was a Fusion drive, there would be second physical drive for the Fusion logical drive. Disk Utility.app only shows one physical drive "APPLE SSD AP1024N Media" which is probably "disk0". "disk1" is a synthetic drive representing the contents of the APFS partition of "disk0". The APFS partition contains an APFS container.

"Hard Drive 1" is a volume group which consists of a Data volume "Macintosh HD - Data" (disk1s1) and a System volume "Hard Drive 1" (disk1s6). The System volume has a snapshot (disk1s6s1) containing macOS (this is usually read only). The Data volume is where files that can be changed by the user are located (the user folder, /Library, applications added by the user, etc).

"Hard Drive 2" (disk1s2) is a separate volume in the same APFS container as "Hard Drive 1".