A storage device is a necessary computing hardware that is used for storing, reading, transferring data and information. A computer needs at least one hard drive, SSD to contain system and data. It can be external or internal.
There are various storage devices, including solid-state drive, hard drive disk, SD card, USB flash drive. In most conditions, you can just insert a USB drive or SD card to use these devices. However, sometimes, we may encounter some problem like your external hard drive not working, or need to completely wipe a hard drive including system, or some management issue.
In this post, we will start on how to initialize a new disk. Then guide you on how to manage your HDD, SSD, USB drive in a right way.
Initialize a disk in Windows 10, 8, 7
When you insert a brand new hard drive or SSD, you can view it on the File Explorer until it is initialized or set up.
Initializing a disk is to get it prepared to be used by Windows. We will initialize a disk to MBR or GPT, and create at least one partition, or we call it “drive” on the disk. In case any mistake during hard drive setup, if you have no idea what is MBR and GPT, please read the difference between them as follows.
What is MBR and GPT?
MBR is short for master boot record, and GPT is GUID partition table. They are 2 partition tables that are used to describe partitions on the disk. Windows can quickly retrieve a file from numerous data according to the partition table.
The 2 different partition table format comes with different features. General speaking, GPT is a new table. It supports 9.4ZB space at most. And it is more resilient to error, got higher security. And it works well with new Windows OSes, like Windows 10, 8, 7. While MBR only supports TB. If you find your storage device is only show 2 TB, you may need to convert it to GPT.
Here, you can refer to the following table to know the difference between MBR and GPT partition table.
If the disk contains the system, the determinant what the boot mode your PC support. MBR with BIOS boot mode, and GPT with UEFI boot mode are must for system disk.
So you have known what partition table your disk should be initialized. Here are the steps of setting up a disk.
- Connect the hard drive, or SSD to your PC. Right-click on the “This PC” on the desktop, and click “Management”, and choose “Disk Management”.
2. Right-choose the disk you just connected, which is marked as “not initialized”, hit “Initialize Disk”.
Step 3. Here comes a small dialogue, choose “MBR” or “GPT”, and click “OK”.
Create a new partition:
Now you can partition the hard drive to store data. Disk Management can also do that.
- Open Disk Management, to create a new partition, right-click on the Unallocated space, and then click New Partition.
- In the New Partition Wizard, then click Next. Click the type of partition that you want to create, and then click Next.
- And follow the program to finish the operation. It will ask you to assign a letter, to edit the size, and so on. When it is over, you will see a new partition on Disk Management.
Note:
● Disk Management can’t help you to create extended and logical partitions.
● There has to be some unallocated space on the hard drive.
Extend a partition
Resizing/Extending a partition is to change the size of partitions on a hard dive. In DM, you can shrink a partition size, and extend a partition with a deleted partition.
Note: Disk Management only allows you to extend a partition with adjacent unallocated space, so in most cases, you have to delete a partition beforehand to extend a partition.
- Launch DM. For example, to extend C drive, right-click on D drive (the adjacent drive), and click “Delete volume”.
- Follow its prompts, and the partition will be unallocated.
3. Right-click on the C drive, and click “Extend Volume”.
4. You’ll be in Extend Volume Wizard interface, click Next. Adjust the space that will be added into the C drive.
Final words
Disk Management can be easy-to-use tool for managing your storage device. It can help you toformat, delete, extend, and mark partition as active. And most steps are smiliar.
But it has some drawbacks and limits. It unable to move a partition, can’t copy a partition. More importantly, if you want to dispose of your hard drive, it does not support securely delete files, you may need to turn to a third-party tool.
