From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Preparing a new drive

Preparing a new drive

From the course: Help Yourself: Tech Tips Weekly

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Preparing a new drive

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- [Instructor] Most of the time, adding a new hard drive to your computer is easy. Plug it in and go. I'm attaching an external hard drive to this system. It's recognized, and soon you see it appear in the File Explorer window. There it is. It's assigned a drive letter and it's made available instantly it's ready to use. The reason this operation works is that the drive comes prepared. It's partitioned and it's formatted. These two steps make the drive instantly available for use. Partitioning is what prepares media for use by a file system. It determines how many logical drives are available on the storage device. For external storage, typically, only one partition is available, though more can be created. Each partition becomes a separate storage area on the drive, often called a logical drive. For example, most Windows 10 computers feature primary storage with three partitions. One for the UEFI or the BIOS…

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