▷ How to format external hard drive in windows 10 [best methods]

Today we will see one of the actions that we most often carry out those of us who use portable storage devices, we will see how to format a portable hard drive or USB drive to delete all the files that we have inside it and not have to wait several minutes for them to be deleted. manually.

Index of contents

Formatting a portable hard drive can solve a lot of our lives on certain occasions. It is an interesting practice if we do not want to be deleting the files through the file explorer, something really tiresome if we have a large number of them stored.

Another reason why we may want to format our storage unit is because we have a virus inside or we want to lend the device to someone. Of course we do not want them to access personal files and the best and fastest way to get rid of them is by formatting it.

Another assumption that we make, and that this action will be necessary, will be when a USB device loses its format and remains as a " RAW drive ", something that usually happens if we use these types of drives very widely.

What happens when we format a portable or USB hard drive

The fact of formatting a hard disk connected to our equipment by USB is that we will erase the information that is stored on it. Although if we are precise, what we are really doing with the typical option that has "quick formatting" is to delete the partition table and create it again so that, apparently, we have a drive without any files. On the contrary, using Diskpart, we will erase absolutely everything.

In this case of fast formatting, we are not physically deleting the files that are inside it, but, when creating a new partition table, they will not be visible and the new information that we enter will overwrite the one that already exists and is invisible..

If we were to use a program to recover files, such as remo recover, or similar, we could recover much of the information that we have apparently erased by quickly formatting our portable hard drive.

Format portable hard drive to be compatible with Mac and Linux

When formatting a portable hard drive we will have to know what formats exist and which are the most suitable depending on what we are going to use it for.

• NTFS: is the file system that Windows uses for its system partitions. This format is compatible with all Microsoft systems, but not with other operating systems, at least in full. Nor should we use it to connect it to music player devices, for example. The interesting thing about this disk file system is that it allows you to store files larger than 2 GB. vFAT or FAT32: this format is compatible with reading and writing with practically all operating systems, the problem is that we can only store files of up to 2 GB. For example, one more movie of this will not be supported. exFAT: or extended FAT, is a format that extends the capacity of the FAT file system to host files larger than 2 GB. It is compatible with Linux and Mac OS X from version 10.7 as long as we choose a cluster size greater than 1024 bytes.

Ways to format portable hard drive

There are many programs that are capable of performing the action of formatting our USB disk, although we will use those provided by Windows natively to avoid the need to install anything extra on our computer.

Format portable hard drive from Windows Explorer (direct way)

Well, the first way is ridiculously simple, since the only thing we will have to do to format it is open the file explorer and go to " this team ".

Here we will right click on our portable hard drive to choose the " format... " option.

A window will open in which we will have to choose a series of parameters to configure the format we want to give to the hard drive or USB drive.

File system: we have the three options that we have seen before, choose the one that best suits you for the use that you are going to give to the hard drive.

Allocation unit size: The default size usually varies depending on each unit. The smaller the cluster size, the less empty spaces will be left if we are storing small files. A good cluster size can be 1024 bytes for NTFS, and exFAT and 4096 for FAT32.

The next thing we will have to do is click on " start " to apply the changes. The disk will be formatted and everything inside it will be removed.

Format portable hard drive with diskpart

Diskpart is a well-known tool and used to carry out all kinds of actions on our hard drive through the command terminal.

The first thing we will do, of course, is open a Windows command terminal, it could be PowerShell or Command Prompt. We will use the first option.

We are going to right click on the start menu so that a gray background menu appears in which we will have to choose the option " Windows PowerShell (administrator) ".

Now we will place the command:

diskpart

To start the program.

list disk

To list the hard drives that are on our computer. Here we will have to look very carefully at the storage space to identify which is our portable hard drive. We keep the number you have.

select disk

To enter the drive we want to format.

clean

We delete all the file system and partitions you have.

create partition primary

We create a new partition on the disk.

select partition 1

activate

We enter inside the partition to carry out the steps for formatting.

format fs =

or

format fs = quick

Here we will have to put "ntfs", "vfat" or "exfat" to assign a format. We can also put the word "quick" at the end of the command to make formatting quick. If we don't put it, it will completely delete all the files from the drive, but it will be considerably slower.

assign letter =

We assign a letter for the unit, the one that we want that is not yet in use.

exit

We quit the Diskpart program.

Through these two options we will have more than enough to be able to format portable hard drive both quickly and slowly and assign the file system we want.

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Why do you find it useful to format a portable hard drive or USB drive? We hope the information has been helpful. Write us if you want to know more or if you have had any problem.