How to Partition an External Hard Drive on Windows 10

Do you want to split your hard drive into multiple partitions?

Are you willing to partition the hard drive to encrypt a specific partition and leave others for other storage purposes?

Partitioning an external hard drive can be useful especially when you are planning to secure one of the partitions and keep others accessible.

In fact, you can use other partitions for backups from Windows Backup and Recovery Tool, for storing your private documents and media files, or to store your downloaded torrents.

You will learn in this tutorial how to use the Disk Management tool to partition your external hard drive the easy way.

Let’s go!

Partition Your External Hard Disk on Windows 10

Open Run prompt using the Windows+R keyboard shortcut, type in diskmgmt.msc.

After formatting your external hard drive, or if you don’t want to format it just follow the same steps.

Right-click on your hard drive and click “Shrink Volume…“.

Enter the amount of space to shrink in MB, for example, I have a 1TB hard drive that I want to split into two even partitions, so I put 500000MB in the box.

Click on the “Shrink” button.

Right-click on the “Unallocated” space and choose “New Simple Volume…“.

Click “Next“.

Click “Next“.

If you want to create two new partitions, then enter the corresponding volume size in “MB“.

Select a letter for your new drive partition.

Click “Next“.

Enter a volume label that will appear under “This PC“.

Click “Next“.

Click “Finish” to create and format the new partition.

This is the result on Disk Management.

And this is how the result looks like under “This PC“, two partitions, one external hard drive.

You just learned how to partition an external hard drive the easy way!

If you have any questions feel free to leave a comment below

Don’t forget to share this tutorial with your friends & family.