Partitioning Seagate Backup Plus 3TB

Hello guys, I've bought a Seagate Backup Plus 3TB External Hard drive today. I've never used external hard drive before. I want to partition my HDD into 3 drive. 1 for personal photos, videos and documents, 1 for movies and stuff & 1 for random files from which files will be deleted and and added frequently. I want the personal drive to be locked with a password so that even if anyone takes my hard drive they won't be able to open that drive. Even if anyone tries to format it it won't format without the password.

Now I have 3 questions:

1. Which software shall I use to partition my drive and how? In what format shall I partition my drives?

2. Which software shall I use to lock my drive and how?

3. Is it safe to keep the hard drive always connected to my desktop/laptop? or shall I put it away when I am done transferring?


Please be as descriptive as you can guys, I'm new to this and detailed information would be helpful.

Thank You.

 

1. Disk Management
2. BitLocker - entire drive only. Or TrueCrypt. Or if Seagate has a special software.
3. You should be able to auto sleep set it after a period of time elapse.

 

So there's no locker that would let me lock the drives individually?

would it be ok if I completely unplug the HDD and just plug it whenever I need it? (I won't be needing it much maybe once a day) I've moved to Bangladesh for couple of months and here we have power outage, So electricity comes and goes so even if the HDD will be in sleep mode it will be turned off and turned on quite a lot because of the electricity, so wouldn't it be better if I just use it whenever I need it and keep it unplugged from both USB and power source when I don't need it? (I guess um just being a lil over protective, I just don't want it to go BOOM and ofcourse I don't want to lose my data)

 

TrueCrypt - Free Open-Source On-The-Fly Disk Encryption Software for Windows 7/Vista/XP, Mac OS X and Linux should be able to let you lock partitions - though I've not used it. There are some threads here on NBR if you need more insight. But read through the website first. And it's open source free.

I'm don't know about the Seagate drive but it may self encrypt when a password is applied.

You can always just unplug the drive, absolutely, if your worried about power outages and surges.

If you open files on the drive using a program on the local computer sometimes they'll get locked so you'll have figure out which ones don't give you a problem. The ones that do you'll just need to transfer if you don't want that problem.