Just (today) bought a Verbatim 1TB USB-3[1] external drive for general backup purposes, plus transferring data between computers - all Windoze, but a mixture of XP, W7-32bit and W7-64bit.
It came formatted as Fat32, and there appears to be a single partition occupying the whole of its 1TB capacity.
However, the on-disk manual which came with it seems to suggest that Fat32 partitions are limited to a maximum of 32GB. I know that to be untrue because I've got a 64GB thumb drive which is formatted as Fat32 - and that's definitely got more than 32GB of data on it. Some sources seem to suggest that the default Windoze format command cannot format more than 32GB at a time in Fat32 but there are third-party alternatives which can.
Can anyone shed any light on this please?
The manual suggests that users may want to create multiple partitions on the disk - possibly a mixture of Fat32 (for maximum transportability) and NTFS (for fewer size - presumably both partition size *and* file size - limitations). If I understand it correctly, it's telling me to delete the existing partition - so the whole thing becomes unallocated space - and then create the required new partitions. Questions: a) is this necessary? b) if I delete the existing partition, presumably the documents and software which came on the disk will be lost unless I copy it all elsewhere first? c) If I create multiple partitions (say, 1 fat32 primary, 1 Extended - containing several NTFS logical partitions) and give each one a drive letter, will the drive letters change depending on which system it's connected to at any one time - or do I need to choose drive letters which won't conflict with those in use on *any* of the systems to which I will connect it? d) if I back up my operating systems, using something like Paragon Rescue & Backup software (which is stand-alone, and boots from a CD) will that software be able to see all the partitions? [My current thoughts are that I will use a separate partition for each system I'm backing up - so that each one is self-contained].
I think I know broadly what I want to achieve, but I feel that I need to understand all the issues before starting to muck about with this new disk.
Any constructive comments will be greatly appreciated.
[1] It's backwards compatible with USB-2, which is how I shall be using it - in the short term, at any rate.