After a long time of relying upon windows 7 ( I skipped windows 8 and 8.1 ), it was finally time for me to upgrade to a new operating system. So recently I upgraded my PC to windows 10 and as my storage needs were also increasing, I decided to add another 2 Terabyte of storage space to my PC.
Installing an hard drive in windows is easy as having a piece of cake. You just need to connect the SATA cable and the SATA power adapter and the hard disk will be connected to your PC. However, you won’t be able to access the storage space until and unless you partition the drive and format them. The process of partitioning and formatting drivers is same on both windows 7 and windows 10, however for those who are new to windows 10, a little help would greatly save your time.
For those who are installing a new hard drive on their windows 10 PC, here’s how you can partition and format the hard drive in windows 10.
How to Partition and Format a New hard drive in Windows 10
Note: Make sure you have connected the hard drive to your pc properly.
- Step 1: Right click on File explorer and select Manage.
- Step 2: Select Disk management under Storage.
- Step 3: Starting from windows 8, you will be required to select from two partition styles. the MBR partition style is very old and the GPT partition style is new and meant for PC’s running with the latest hardware. If your PC has a UEFI enabled BIOS, select the GPT partition style otherwise select the MBR partition style.
- Step 4: Your new hard drive should appear as disk 1, disk 2 or a similar name with all the storage space labelled as unallocated. In my case its the Disk 1. Right click on the unallocated space and select New simple volume.
- Step 5: Click on Next in the New Simple Volume wizard..
- Step 6: You can now see the total storage space available in the hard disk drive in terms of megabytes. Simply click on Next if you want to use the new hard disk as a single drive. Otherwise, it’s upto you on how many drives you want to create.
In my case I want to create four drives with equal storage space. The total storage capacity of my 2TB drive is 1907600 MB, so i will create four drives with a storage capacity of 476900MB each.
- Enter the storage capacity of the first drive and click on Next.
- Step 7: let the drive be assigned a drive name automatically and click on Next.
- Step 8: Select NTFS as the file system and make sure perform quick format is selected. Click on Next.
- Step 9: Click on Finish to format the newly created drive.
Once the drive is created windows will automatically open it.
- Step 10: Now right click again on the unallocated space and repeat the process from Step 4 onwards until you’ve used all the unallocated space.
Once you’ve created all the drives, you can open the file explorer to view your new drive and use them.
