Question about WD My Book

To create partitions on an external hard drive, the drive does not necessarily need to be formatted, but it may be necessary to shrink an existing partition to create free space. If you have difficulty using the "shrink" option in Windows 11 Disk Management, it could be because the partition is not in NTFS format or because there are other restrictions. You can also use third-party software to make partitioning easier. Note that formatting a hard drive deletes all data stored on it, so you should back up important files beforehand.