How to partition your new drive
1Right-click the unallocated space that constitutes your new drive and select ‘New Simple Volume’ 1 in the menu that pops up (a volume is an area of storage). Click Next, then enter (in megabytes) the capacity you want to devote to the first of your partitions. By default, Disk Management suggests you should use the drive’s full capacity, but if you want a partition of around 300GB, enter 300000 2 , then click Next. use by another drive currently visible to the system.
In reality, as you’ll see below, a ‘480GB’ drive rarely has 480GB of useable space. In part this is due to the mathematics of computing, in which a megabyte is enough space either for a million or 1,024 million characters, depending how it’s calculated (see Issue 504, page 69 for more details). Equally, though, some of the available space is also reserved for formatting and operating-system use, so it’s kept safely out of reach.
See Workshop above for instructions on partitioning your new drive.
5Amend your partitions With both partitions in place and formatted, your new SSD will appear in Windows Explorer as two distinct drives (see screenshot below). We can format either without affecting
2Choose a drive letter to denote your new partition in Windows. Here, we’re choosing the letter P 1 to remind us that this partition will be used to store photos. Click Next again, then leave the defaults as they are in the following box, so that the SSD is formatted using the NTFS file system. Optionally, change the ‘Volume label’ to something meaningful like ‘Photos’, then click Next. the contents of the other. Furthermore, if we later change our mind and want to reinstate the drive as a single large partition, we can.
To do this, back up the contents of both partitions, because making changes at the file-system level risks destroying the disk’s contents. Then, return to Disk Management and right-click one of your partitions. Select ‘Delete Volume…’
3Disk Management will present a summary of your choices. If you’re happy with them, click Finish to partition the drive. As you can see from our screenshot, you will now have two partitions: one of 292GB 1 , and another of 154GB 2 , which is unallocated. Right-click the unallocated space and repeat steps 1 to 2 to set it up for use with documents. in the pop-up menu and you’ll see a warning that deleting the volume will erase all data on it. If you’re happy for this to happen, click Yes. Now repeat this process for the second partition, then repeat the instructions in our Workshop above, this time creating just one partition rather than two by following Disk Management’s suggestion that you use its full capacity all at once.