Hacker News Reader

Great article!

Apple contrasts [space sharing] with the static allocation of disk space to support multiple HFS+ instances, which seems both specious and an uncommon use case.

Really? I depend on this use case every year to safely test drive pre-release OS versions.

View on HN

That use of multiple partitions I think qualifies as uncommon which is not to suggest that it's not useful.

Extremely commonly used by engineers within Apple, however =)

I'm curios, how do you use this feature to install different OS versions?

Maybe I'm misreading the author, but I take "static allocation of disk space to support multiple HFS+ instances" as a fancy way to refer to multiple partitions on the same physical volume.

(So, Yosemite on one, and a pre-release of El Capitan on the other.)

Space sharing just promises to allow the same thing but without wasting space.

This seems too obvious and important a use case to call "specious and an uncommon".

I read it as non-sparse HFS+ disk images (dmg vs sparseimage)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com