Windows 10: Can I still partition and format my internal and external drives if my BIOS storage...

Can I still partition and format my internal and external drives if my BIOS storage settings are set to AHCI instead of RAID?The question is for Windows 10 and 11I am using a laptop.In the past, I have had drives where I could partition it using the Windows built in disk management program to allocate for example 400GB to a certain partition or Drive letter and 550GB to another. Does this feature work still if you select AHCI instead of RAID in the BIOS settings or does it not matter?Thanks

:)

 

Format an external Drive.

Hello Roger,

Thank you for posting your concern in Microsoft Community and welcome to the Windows 10 Family.

I would suggest you to follow the below steps to format the drive you are referring to.

• Right Click on Start menu and select Open Computer Management.
  
• 
  In the left pane, under Storage, click Disk Management.
  
• 
  Right-click the volume that you want to format, and then click Format.
  
• 
  To format the volume with the default settings, in the Format dialog box, click
  OK, and then click OK again.
  

Note: You cannot format a disk or partition that is currently in use, including the partition that contains Windows.

Hope it helps.

Thank you.

 

Formatting External hard drive.

1. Launch the Disk Manager with diskmgmt.msc
2. Use right-clicks to delete all partitions on the external disk
3. Create one or several new partitions
4. Format them

 

Internal Drive+Enclosure or External Drive

Hi, I'm not very familiar with storage solutions so I was wondering if you guys could help me out. I'm looking to buy a 1TB+ drive for backup. External drives seem like more elegant solutions but when I looked on Newegg many reviews seem to suggest that they are not long lived (e.g. break within weeks/months). Is this true? If so, are internal drives + enclosures better? Or do any of you have better solutions that I don't know about (like I said I'm not that familiar with the storage department). Thanks.