How to format external hard drive | Basic Guidelines here

How to Format External Hard Drive

The computer might experience malfunctions due to wear and tear or viruses affecting the program which results in the slow functioning of the entire system. It is advisable to format the driver yearly. The significance of formatting the hard drive prevents the system from future crashes. The external drive is just a hard drive (HDD) or solid-state drive (SSD) that is connected physically to the computer.

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Easy Guidelines For Format External Hard Drive

Quick Steps to Format External Hard Drive

Connect an end of the data cable to the driver and the other end to the computer. Just like in the case of a USB port connection for external drivers.

On the Search bar, open Start, click the Windows logo on the bottom-left corner of the screen, and press the Windows key on your keyboard.

Open your File Explorer and select your computer’s name on the left side of File Explorer Window.

Under the Devices and Drivers heading in the center of the PC, click the external hard drive’s name and select it.

Click on the Manage tab.

Select Format. Click the File system box option near the top of the page.

Select a format that you want to use.

Click Start and then Ok. Again, click Ok when prompted.

Elaborate Steps to Format the External Hard Drive for Windows

Open Disk Management to start this process. It can be done in a number of ways depending on the Windows version you use. The easiest method to open is diskmgmt.msc in the Start menu or run dialog box. It might take a few minutes to open the disk management option. Select the drive which you want to format from the list.
After finding the drive that you want to format, right-click it and select Format to open the disk-formatting wizard. In the next step, go to the Volume label text box and enter the name you would like to give to the drive.
Open the File System text box and choose NTFS, because it is the best and most recent file system available. On the Allocation unit size text box, select Default. Based on the size of the hard drive, the best allocation size is to be chosen.

Select the Perform a quick format checkbox. In this, the Windows will check the box by default. It will suggest you do a quick format, but we recommend you to un-check this box as it will do a standard format. The Standard format is the best as it checks completely and the existing data is unrecoverable.
The last step is to enable the file and folder compression setting that is not checked by default. This option allows you to choose files or folders which are to be compressed or decompressed.
Check the settings you have made and then click OK. Check the following details: Volume label: [label of your choosing], File system: NTFS, Allocation unit size: Default, Perform a quick format: unchecked, and Enable file and folder compression: unchecked. After checking all of these settings, click Ok. The hardware format has begun, and you can check the status in the top of Disk Management.