I have a 16 terabyte external drive formatted using an exFAT partition. I am using only about a quarter of it and want to shrink the partition to make a second drive. Apparently this is possible using the tools native to Windows 11 but, “it is generally not recommended using native Windows tools because it can cause data loss or make the drive RAW/unreadable.”
Supposedly, there are third-party utilities that can do this. Can someone recommend one (preferably something free)?
IIRC MiniTool Partition Wizard is what I usually use.
I’ve used this. It’s free and works great. Though I’ve only used it with NTFS-formatted partitions.
I’d just buy another 4 Tb external drive ($100-$150), copy your existing data to it, then reformat the existing drive and re-partition it however you want.
In addition to the MiniTool Partition Wizard, I’m fairly sure I’ve used Windows’ built in Disk Management Tool (right click on the Start button and it’ll be there) and only ended up having to use the 3rd party tool for certain circumstances. IIRC, Windows disc management will allow you to expand a partition in one direction but not the other.
To simply shrink your current, partition in order to add a second one, I think, won’t be a problem for Windows. But it’s easy to back yourself into a corner that you’ll need a 3rd party tool to get yourself out of anyways. I know I’ve done that.
I don’t remember why I did it, but I ended up with my Windows partition too small and rapidly filling up while I had a huge unused partition on the ‘wrong’ (left?) side of my Windows partition and couldn’t get it back using tools Windows provides.
If you’re going that route, just set up the partitions on the new drive to how you want them and move the data from the old drive to the new one. No need to do it twice.
If you buy a second drive, it’s even smarter to partition it as you like before copying the data across. Then do as you suggest: reformat and repartition, or better yet just repartion, the old drive too.
Thank you for the suggestion, but in my case the external drive is an exFAT partition and that tool cannot shrink it, nor can the native tools in Windows 11.
I’ve had a good experience with AOMEI Partition Assistant (the free Standard version, which will bug you to upgrade but that’s easy for me to ignore). According to their website, it will handle exFAT.
Thanks. I’ll try it.
Is GParted still around? It’s a Linux tool, but you could easily create a bootable medium (thumb drive or DVD, if you’re old-fashioned), boot it up and do partitioning in all relevant file systems.
ETA: yes, it’s still there:
This is the route I would take. Trying to futz with the existing partition comes with a lot of work and too many risks.
If you value your time and data $150 is easily justifiable. And now you have even more storage to fiddle with as you like.
Actually I have large enough external drives so I might just back it up and repartition.
Personally, I’d recommend backing it up and then resizing the partition. The backup is for if that process fails.
The idea is that you still get some of the time savings of resizing the partition, but, since you have the disk space for it, you also get the security of having a backup for if something goes wrong.
I can’t imagine a 16TB hard drive is very fast at all. A NAS with RAID could be, but just one drive is almost certainly shingled, which are slower to read and write. And, of course, hard drives speeds are measured in RPMs. The bigger the platter, the slower the actual read spead.. And you can only have so many platters.