Here is some OSX software I’ve found helpful for managing hard drives, in no particular order (yet).
At some point I may write up the whole saga of how I turned my early-2008 Mac Pro tower from a huge doorstop into a terrific media server and home workstation… but in the short term I wanted to note these tools that were particularly helpful. Of course the built-in Disk Utility played a big role too.
iTerm 2 – terminal app
Big improvement over the default iTerm that ships with OSX. I really like pairing iTerm 2 with ZSH (in turn an improvement over the “bash” shell most people use).
Carbon Copy Cloner – create bootable clones of drives or partitions
CCC was indispensable in safely migrating from Lion to Mavericks.
Beyond Compare – folder-based comparison tool
BC was a huge help in identifying missing tunes in bringing my old Mac Pro Tower out of retirement (which involved repartitioning its newer drives, and merging my laptop’s music with the old tower during the migration to a dedicated media partition).
Disk Inventory X – analyze your HDDs to see where the big files are
This was very helpful in helping my HDD restructuring.