

Important: This process will delete everything on the drive, so you should back up any data of the flash drive before proceeding.

Whatever the reason, you can use the Disk Management tool on Windows 10 to set up multiple partitions on a USB flash drive to keep different groups of data separate or configure a drive with various file systems.

Also, if you carry around a thumb drive with sensitive data, creating multiple partitions can create storage for easy access to app installers and other non-critical files and another one that you can encrypt with BitLocker to protect sensitive data.

The ability to divide the storage on the device lets you create additional partitions with the same or a different file system to take advantage of the entire drive. If you have to work with a flash drive formatted using FAT32, you can only use up to 32GB of space, and if the drive is large, you could be wasting a lot of storage. Instead of switching to a different file system, you can configure one partition compatible with Windows 10 and another compatible with Linux. While there's nothing wrong with this approach, there a number of scenarios where dividing the drive into multiple partitions can bring additional benefits.įor instance, if you work in a mixed OS environment, and you would typically format your USB flash drive using the exFAT file system on Windows 10, unless you use workarounds, you won't be able to access the files from a Linux machine. On Windows 10, you usually connect a USB flash drive to your device, use the format tool to set up the compatible file system, and then start dumping files on it.
