Why are there two hard drives when we clean reinstalled iMac to Sonoma OS14?

[pleasehelp1]

Why are there two hard drives when we clean reinstalled iMac to Sonoma OS14? One says HD the other HD Data which appears empty. Trash the empty?

 

[Sciuriware]

Why are there two hard drives when we clean reinstalled iMac to Sonoma OS14? One says HD the other HD Data which appears empty. Trash the empty?

Is that an iMac with fusion drive? Then you got 2 drives indeed.
;JOOP!

 

[Fishrrman]

Because that's the way the new OS "looks".
There are numerous containers/partitions and volumes.
It's "the new Mac OS".

You DO NOT want to trash those drives!

 

[Bigwaff]

This is how Disk Utility displays APFS containers and volumes. Excellent read if you really want to understand what is going on...

Working with APFS Volume Groups - Bombich Software

bombich.com

 

[duncandb]

Starting with MacOS 10.15 the boot volume is actually 2 main volumes behind the scenes, a read-only one with the MacOS itself and a writeable one with everything else, which you see as separate in Disk Utility but which the Finder makes look like a single volume. If the Finder itself is showing 2 volumes, this is likely a bug, one I have encountered before one one of my Macs, but you can just ignore the second one.