Solved Need help extending the volume of an external drive

Madrona said:

I was using extend to add space (which is what I used in Windows Disk Management), should I be using move/resize in Minitool?

My drive is a Samsung 870 Evo 4 TB

Click to expand...

if you are just extending the drive to be able to use the free space then Windows Disk Management will be more then able to do as you require.

best of luck Steve ..

Madrona said:

should I be using move/resize in Minitool?

Click to expand...

Without a screenshot or two... it's hard to understand what you're trying to do.
We can't see your screen and a picture is worth a thousand words.

Madrona said:

I wanted to leave around 15- 20% free for garbage collection,

Click to expand...

for a bit of humor, why do you want to collect garbage?

Ghot said:

Without a screenshot or two... it's hard to understand what you're trying to do.
We can't see your screen and a picture is worth a thousand words.

Click to expand...

Already posted screenshots and explained what I'm trying to do.

I was trying to understand how to extend a volume to a certain exact fraction of a drive's capacity. I didn't realize TB's don't resolve into GB's evenly and that what the software is showing is always the binary measurement, not the disk's hardware base ten measurement. Using Windows Disk Management to extend the available space with everything in MB's made it more confusing.. I am going to be populating a 5 Bay external drive enclosure (DAS) with 4 or 5 drives, and I just needed a relatively round number to help me remember the drive's capacity.

But with yours and everyone's help here, I now understand it much better. After fiddling with it some more, I have now managed to create an exact fraction of available space, at least in TB. In the end I decided to make it 3.5 TB instead of 3.2 TB (In GB it comes to 3584.00). The MiniTool Partition Wizard actually shows the capacity in both TB and GB when doing the resizing, which was also helpful. When I was switching back and forth between Disk Management and MiniTool to check my adjustments, for some reason it was showing a difference of a few hundred GB's between the two utilities. Not sure why there was a discrepency in the accuracy. They are both showing the same number now.

Thanks to everyone.

I will mark this thread as solved.