Alternative to Disk Utility?

Soft Raid software but I don't like third party. I keep a Mavericks and a yosemite boot volume handy and use either one.

I have to agree that Disk Utility has become a joke. Whoever decided that the window didn't need to be adjustable is clueless. Fortunately, I have no compelling reason to use El Capitan and can still use functional versions of Disk Utility. Back in the days of the classic OS, there were several third-party alternatives to Disk Utility for formatting drives and media. It would be nice to have other options now. I don't use RAID so I have never looked at SoftRAID. In the meantime, I am very happy that I have earlier OS versions installed and available.

What I can say about the new Disk Utility is, there's nothing I couldn't do I needed to do so far. I haven't felt a need to resize it's window. I don't mind scrolling. With SIP there is really no need to verify or repair permissions so I'm fine with it. On the off chance I need to use Terminal commands, they were most likely something I needed to use anyway,

I agree, everything that I was doing can still get done. However, using the Mav Disk Utility, I never messed up the fusion drive.

Funny you should mention that. I bought an iMac with a Fusion drive the first year they became available. Before Apple or anyone else realized it was a bad idea to partition a Fusion drive more than once, I tried to add two partitions to mine using the old version of Disk Utility. It broke it. I called Apple support and ended up talking to a Senior Advisor who walked me through the Terminal commands he thought would fix it. Not only did it not fix it, one of the commands erased a 1TB eternal drive I had filled with music and photos, artwork and movies. 😁

Anyway, to make a long story longer, I took the iMac into my local Apple Store. They couldn't even figure out how to reinstall the OS so they gave me a new one. So it was certainly possible to break a Fusion drive with the old version of Disk Utility. 😎

Despite my first experience with Fusions drives, I ordered my 5k iMac with one. I think it's a good compromise between a normal platter drive and an SSD.

I keep a partition with Yosemite on my drive for a few reasons, though I normally work in El Capitan all day. One being the Sofortbild camera tethering software still doesn't work in El Cap, thanks to Nikon dragging their heels on releasing new SDK's for El Cap so the software can recognize their cameras.

But, I tend to also use it for Disk Utility because the new version is just too weird, fairly crippled and buggy. One, I not just like being able to see hidden partitions, I sometimes need to see them. For instance, I have EL Cap installed on my SSD and again on WD hard drive as a bare minimum install to do disk maintenance and other things with. That means when I do a full install of an EL Cap update on each disk, I end up with a hidden recovery partition on both drives. There's certainly no need for two of them, so I use DU in Yosemite to show hidden partitions, which allows me to remove the recovery partition on the WD drive. The new version cannot be altered to show hidden partitions.

Second, I've tried partitioning drive with DU under EL Cap, and it's the clumsiest thing I have ever seen. Can't tell you how many times I've tried to do something like create two partitions, clicked Apply, and it suddenly shows three partitions. Want a new partition to be a specific size? Good luck with that! All you can do is drag to the closest value the pie will move to. If you try to enter a value at the right after starting to make the new partition to get the size you want, it will instead create yet another partition.

Basically, it seems to me someone just got tired of the old look and changed it for the sake of change. Yes, the old design looked a bit outdated (so what!), but it worked, and worked very well.

Do you know of a link on steps to create a boot volume (Mavericks and Yosemite)?

Very simple. Use your Install OS X Yosemite.app file or your Install OS X Mavericks.app file with the Recovery Partition Creator 3.8 utility and a 4GB USB thumb drive. This will create a Recovery HD of either of those OS X versions on the thumb drive that you can boot from.

Basically, it seems to me someone just got tired of the old look and changed it for the sake of change.

Hasn't that been the pattern in Apple's past quarter century of OS design? 😉

@Kurt Lang & Limnos

You two are starting to sound like two old men lamenting the removal of large fins from Cadillacs.

😁

You two are starting to sound like two old men lamenting the removal of large fins from Cadillacs.

Haha! No way! Those things were ugly. Excessive design for no purpose other than to stand out. It was also the Space Race explosion. Anything and everything that could be designed to look like a comic book stylized late 1950's spacecraft, was. Buildings, cars, you name it.

Change is good, but fer' cryin' out loud, could they at least have tested DU in El Capitan enough to make sure it worked before springing it on everyone? It sounds minor, but not being able to expand the size of DU so you can see all of your drive and partitions at once should have been a top design feature, not completely dropped.

My assumption is Apple redesigned DU for the masses. I think some of us forget not everyone is a power user who miss certain features. New buyers have no clue you could resize the DU window and no doubt wouldn't know to miss it.

It's the same thing with experienced Windows and Linux users. Every time something is changed they freak. 😎