I recently bought a Seagate 1TB external hard drive, which I learned has about 931GB usable space. The drive came formatted in exFAT, which works on both Windows and Macs. The instructions recommended formatting it to NTFS for better performance on Windows, so I followed a tutorial linked in the PDF that came with it. Unfortunately, after formatting, the drive now shows only 465GB of space, which is a big drop. I'm hoping to find out if there's a way to recover the lost space, either by reformatting it back to exFAT or through another method. While I would like to maintain good performance, I'm open to sacrificing that to regain the lost capacity if necessary. Any advice would be appreciated!
3 Answers
You should check disk management in Windows. It can show you the actual capacity of your drive and any existing partitions. Sometimes the partition only gets set to the lower size of 465GB, so there might be unallocated space that you can expand into your partition. If that’s the case, you can simply extend the partition there. If not, you might have to delete and recreate partitions, so make sure to back up your data first!
Make sure your external hard drive was purchased from a reliable seller. Sometimes, cheaper drives can be fakes with smaller drives hidden inside larger cases. It's worth checking the product to ensure it's genuine.
What tutorial did you follow to format the drive? Sometimes certain formatting tools can alter settings that might limit available space. Can you double-check the method and see if there's an option to revert back?
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