Noob PC question about new hard drive

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Vodoochild81

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I just installed a 4tb WD Black HD in my Windows 8.1 PC. I come from the Mac world and usually you just go into disk utility and format the disk.

As far as Windows I am a little lost on how I do this.

I found this program called Disk Management and it recognizes my disk so I guess that means I installed it right. However, it says I must initialize disk before Disk Manager can access it.

It is asking me what format I want to use for the disk. MBR or GPT...what do these mean?

Am I even in the right place? I just want to format this disk so it can be ready for use. If someone could give me a quick tutorial that would be great. Thanks.
 
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Dogsnake

Dogsnake

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In disk management assign a letter to the drive if you have not done so. Now you should be able to see it as a labeled disc and you can format it. Select quick format, NTFS and default allocation size. After the format it should be good to use.
 
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shiva92

shiva92

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If you are using MBR the individual partition size will be restricted to 2.19TB. GUID Partition Tables (GPT) can define drives larger than 2.2TB. If you are using GPT, you can create any number of partion of any size. Since you have a 4TB HDD, I will suggest you to go with GPT.
 
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Vodoochild81

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I don't think I am going to be using any partitions on this drive though. So I should do GPT anyway, then assign a letter, and format away?
 
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shiva92

shiva92

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Go ahead bro :)
 
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Vodoochild81

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So I picked GPT and in disk manager all that comes up is disk0, and a big black line that says 3.83TB unallocated. I could not see anywhere an option for reformat. Only create a simple volume. Where is the format option. I do that in disk manager right? I guess this is equivalent of Disk Utility in OSX no?

 
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shiva92

shiva92

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Go to Disk Manager and right click on your drive(drive 0) and click new simple volume. You can give your partion size if you want to have partitions
 
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shiva92

shiva92

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If you want your movies, music and other stuff in different locations, you can create three partitions in your drive and you can use each of those partitions to hold appropriate data. It is for your convenience only. Personally i have created 5 partitions in my Hard Drive and I use each one of them for OS, Music, Movies, Games and Softwares respectively. I feel convenient to keep everything in their respective partitions. But it is not mandatory and it is your choice.
 
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Vodoochild81

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I get that but what are the benefits rather then just creating a folders for music, movies, games, and etc?
 
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shiva92

shiva92

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Say if you want to install Ubuntu, you can create a partition in your hard drive and install ubuntu in it. I have a 500GB Hard drive and one of my partitions has Windows 7 and the other has Ubuntu. Other than that I have 4 partitions as told in the previous comment for games, music, movies and s/w. Other than that it doesn't have any major advantage. It is upto you to have partitions or not.
 
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