There are a few different ways to create partitions on an external hard drive. A logical partition is created from an extended partition and is where all of your non-OS data will be stored. An extended partition is a part of the primary partition, with storage space allocated for purposes other than system boot. It is the partition through which the computer starts up.

A primary partition is the one for the storage of operating system files. There are three main partition types: primary, extended, and logical. Deciding How to Partition an External HDD

It does not have any file or partition size limits. ExFAT works with Windows and Mac, but Linux users will need additional software. FAT32 allows all operating systems to read and write it, but it limits individual file sizes to 4 GB and partition sizes to 8 TB. This file system allows reading and writing in Windows, but Linux and Mac can only read from it. If you use Windows, then you should use NTFS in most cases. Which file system you should choose depends mostly on the operating system you use on your computer. We talk in-depth about file systems in our guide on how to format an external HDD. A hard drive can (and almost always is) partitioned into multiple sectors to make it more efficient at storing and retrieving data, and a single hard drive can even use different file systems for different partitions, if you have a need to do that. The three most common types of file systems are NTFS, FAT32 and exFAT. A file system is a particular method your hard drive uses to read, write and organize files. In order to use a hard drive, it must be formatted according to a certain file system.

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