Can I assign fixed drive letters?
Q
I have a collection of six external hard drives that connect via USB. However, my computer has only three USB ports, with two USB 2.0 and one USB 3.0 connector. I use the drives at different times in various combinations. It drives me mad that, when I plug them in, Windows 10 takes it upon itself to assign drive letters seemingly at random. This causes problems when I try to back up and restore files and programs, as different programs expect different drive letters. Is there any way to stabilise the drive letters, so a specific drive could be Z, another Y and a third X?
Robert Bates
A
You can do this, but there is a quirk that we’ll get to a bit later. First, let’s work through the basic process. Connect one or more of your drives, then press Windows key+x to open the Quick Link menu and choose Disk Management. Now in either the top or bottom pane of the Disk Management window, right-click one of the external drives and choose ‘Change Drive Letter and Paths’ (see screenshot). In the box that appears, click the Change button. Next, in the second box, choose the ‘Assign the following drive letter’ option. Then, to the right of this option, click to open the dropdown list of drive letters and choose the desired letter.
Now, it’s possible that you were aware of this method, have used it and are wondering why drive letters sometimes still jump around. That’s where the aforesaid quirk kicks in.
A problem might arise if you – or Windows – have previously assigned the same letter to different drives. If you subsequently plug in both of those drives simultaneously, then Windows has no choice but to assign a different letter to one of them.
To avoid this, work through your drives now, exploiting your PC’S three USB ports to connect three at once. A good strategy is to start with drive letter Z and work backwards, leaving a one- or two-letter gap between drives: this gives you room to shuffle things later, if needed. So, your first drive is assigned letter Z, the second is X, and so on.