If you’ve bought a new hard drive or solid state drive, then you may have heard that, in order to install it, you need to partition it. What exactly does that mean? As you can probably infer from its name, a partition is just a segment of your drive’s storage space. By partitioning your hard drive, you’re basically creating separate “sections” on your hard drive, and each section can be used for a different purpose.
It’s pretty obvious why this may be a convenient thing to do, but why do you have to partition your drive when you’re first installing it? Simply put, operating systems like to have “room” when you first install them. When you do a fresh install of Windows onto a hard drive or solid state drive, Windows will automatically create these partitions for you. However, if you’re looking to install an operating system like Linux onto a separate drive (for the purposes of dual booting) then you’re almost definitely going to want to store Linux operating system files separately from Windows operating system files.
On a much more basic level, a hard drive has to be partitioned before it can be formatted in Windows. Formatting a hard drive allows you to store data on that hard drive. Every drive needs at least one partition on it. Any partition past that is just personal preference, and there are plenty of reasons to have more than one partition on your drive. A lot of people like to have separate partitions on their drives so that they can store things like games, documents, pictures, and movies all in separate segments of their hard drive.
It’s just a more convenient way of storing and accessing files. Although it’s possible to partition a hard drive using basic Windows tools, you may find that it would be much easier and much more useful to use a partition management software like EaseUS Partition Master to do so. In this article, I’ll talk about how someone can use this nifty software in order to partition a hard drive in Windows 10.
How to partition a hard drive in Windows 10 using EaseUS Partition Master
With EaseUS Partition Master, it’s simple and easy to create a partition on your hard drive. When you open up the software, you should be able to see all of your drives, and all of the partitions that already exist on those drives. What you need to do at this point is find the partition labeled ‘Unallocated’ under the ‘File System’ column. This part should be easy to spot, since it’s also labeled with an asterisk under the partition title column. Once you’ve located this partition, right click anywhere on its row to bring up a little drop down menu. A couple of options will appear here, but the main one that you’re going to be working with is the first one: Create partition. Click this option, and a window titled ‘Create partition’ should open up. From here, you get into the more technical stuff. Some options in this menu are self-explanatory, others are not.
For example, Partition Label can be anything that you want it to be, and Drive Letter is more or less arbitrary. Also, if you’re trying to create a partition on a solid state drive, then it would probably be smart to check the box that reads ‘Optimize for SSD’. Everything else, you may be less sure about. You may notice that EaseUS Partition Master gives you the option to create a logical partition or a primary partition. What’s the difference? If you think of your hard drive as a file cabinet, then a primary partition is sort of like the different drawers, while the logical partitions are the folders that are stored in those drawers. You can make many logical partitions on a drive, but a drive can only contain four primary partitions. If you are trying to create a partition for an operating system, you’re going to want to create a primary partition. If you’re just making a partition for organizational purposes, you should be okay using a logical partition, but you can create a primary partition if you really want to.
You may also be stumped by the dropdown menu that allows you to select different file system formats. There are quite a few different options there, but if you’re someone who is using Windows 10 in this tutorial, then you’re mostly going to be working with Windows file system formats, which include FAT, FAT32, and NTFS. EaseUS Partition Master will have NTFS selected by default.
This is good, because NTFS is pretty much the most common file system among Windows partitions. Although your own research may have caused you to believe that you want a different file system, if you’re not very good with computers, then you should rest assured in knowing that NTFS is probably good enough for your purposes. Don’t be intimidated by all of those options. The same goes for the Cluster Size menu option. That’s part of why I think that EaseUS Partition Master is so great. Even if you aren’t tech savvy, you should have no problem using this software, since they line everything up for you. Once you set your partition size and position, you’re just a couple of clicks away from having a new partition. It’s that simple!
What else is EaseUS Partition Master useful for?
Now, you can do pretty much everything that I just said through standard Windows tools, like Disk Management. So why bother using something like EaseUS Partition Master? I’ll have you know that, as a partition management software, EaseUS Partition Master is incredibly versatile, and you’ll probably find it useful even if you don’t need any partitions created. This software has a ton of different tools and features. One that you may find helpful is the feature that allows you to merge partitions. Maybe you thought that it would be cool to have your television shows and your movies in two separate partitions, but you’re realizing now that it was kind of a ridiculous idea. If that’s the case, then you may afraid that you’ll lose data once you decide to merge those two partitions together. EaseUS Partition Manager has a tool specifically designed to merge partitions, and you shouldn’t at all be worried about data loss in the process.
I’ve really only scratched the surface of what EaseUS Partition Master is capable of in this article. You can use this software to convert partitions across different types, wipe partitions, wipe disks, resize partitions, move partitions, and converting partition file systems. In short, it lets you do pretty much anything that you would want to do with a partition. EaseUS Partition Master is an indispensable tool to anyone who likes to tinker with their hard drives, and it should also prove useful to someone who needs to fiddle with their partitions out of necessity. Whether you’re tech savvy or not, you should still be able to get something out of this software. I highly recommend it to someone who isn’t entirely satisfied with the more standard tools that they’ve been given by Windows to manage partitions.
Best of all EaseUS is giving away a handful of licenses to our readers. You can take part in the giveaway by clicking here.
