difference between AppleAPFSMedia and Container disk

awu212 wrote:

I actually partitioned the entire drive by dividing it into 2 APFS partitions.

But the name of the Container is odd, I would not expect it...."AppleAPFSMedia". I have seen a Container named that way on some of our organization's internal SSDs as well. Usually when I see that something odd is going on with the partitioning of the drive since I am unable to properly delete or erase such a drive as usual.

It really is weird bc the name AppleAPFSMedia is Container disk 7 today.

It changed without me doing anything. :-(

That is normal. The drive identifiers such as "disk7" are assigned as drives and volumes are connected & mounted. The order of drives being connected & mounted will affect the numbering.

In Disk Utility, View - Show All Devices, it shows one in AppleAPFSMedia and the other Container disk (followed by disk names).

In Disk Utility, View - Show All Devices, it shows one in AppleAPFSMedia and the other Container disk (followed by disk names).

Could someone tell me if I did anything wrong? Why not both volumes in AppleAPFSMedia? How can that be fixed?

When creating the second item, you elected to create another partition instead of another volume. I haven't tried this in a while, but I thought the default option when clicking the "+" in the Partition tab is to create an APFS volume within the same Container....I thought you had to specifically opt out of that option to create a separate partition/Container.

To fix it, you must delete the second Container and try to merge it back into the original Container. Then in the Partition tab , click the "+" and accept creating a new volume instead of partition.

Hi awu212,

It looks like Disk Utility is showing a glitch. Can you please do the following instead:

1. Open Terminal, located in Applications -> Utilities.
2. Connect your external drive.
3. Type "diskutil list" without the quotes and hit Enter (Return).
4. Post the output here.

You don’t need to partition APFS. Just add volumes.

If you partitioned it, you should have two containers, each with one volume.

When you partitioned, did you set the format and name the first volume in each partition? Sounds like one was not.

I imagine you just added the second partition (container disk8) and didn’t change the original format. If you select AppleAPFSMedia, what does it show for format and partition map.

It could just be something g weird happened.

Thanks for the output!

Can you please confirm whether disk4 and disk5 are two separate external drives attached to your Mac? If not, I'm concerned - something seems wrong and could indicate that you're using some sort of virtualization program provided by WD.

If disk4 and disk5 are physically separate disks, disk5 looks fine and normal based on your provided description. disk7 is the 3 TB APFS container/partition on disk5 and contains one volume inside, and disk6 is the 2 TB APFS container/partition on disk5 and has its own volume inside as well.

disk4 though... that baffles me. Seems strange the way it's set up, especially for its small size.

It sounds like you actually created 2 volumes, not 2 partitions. But it's hard to tell from your description.

It will help if you post a screenshot of your Disk Utility view > Show All Devices.

I say APFS on DAS devices are ONLY for SSD or NVME drives! For traditional plater drives I say still use HFS+ Extended on old shard drive as DAS device!

It's not a Virtual Machine. It is Virtual Memory and yes, you do need it.