Sandisk Extreme Pro for Partitioning and Imaging

Hello!! Thank You for granting me access to this board. After many hours of gleaning information from Forum7 and Forum10, I finally needed to post. I have rarely been stymied by most of this stuff over the years as a basic user. I have always used Ghost 15 cold image to carry me through my 95, XP and Win 7 years. I always formatted my SSDs to a single partition before installing windows xp or 7. That gave me only ONE partition that I had to back up. Ghost 15 has performed FLAWLESSLY over those years. I have done MANY restores without a hitch. Now I bought a laptop with Win 10 Pro that spreads my party over TWO partitions. I come here and everyone cries Boo Ya over Macrium Free. I Installed Macrium Free on my new Laptop which has two partitions to handle Windows 10 Professional.

SOoooo... I bought a Sandisk Extreme Pro 1T portable SSD strictly for backup imaging. It came pre formatted to exFAT (Healthy Primary Partition). I tried to partition it into two 500G. I found no option with either Win7 or MiniTool Partition Wizard 8. That begs the question should I leave it at exFAT or reformat to NTFS so I can partition it in half for my laptop imaging? How can I partition my Sandisk Extreme Pro 1T Portable SSD into two 500G (or so) partitions...(?)

I am looking to image this new laptop before I start installing anything. This would be the Restore I would use when all goes South before relying on the (Backup to Before God's Creation) partition version.

The tutorial here for Macrium was created before Macrium added a few more cryptic choices that are not clear to someone who didn't do 4 years of computer science. (Norton 15 didn't require 37 years of computer college). It was straight forward. Source, destination, Choose where...

The Takeway: Can I partition a Sandisk Extreme Pro exFAT 1Terr into two 500G partitions? Should I reformat it to NTFS to allow partitioning? Or should I continue using my Tried And True Norton 15 Cold Boot and back up both partitions... Sorry if this is so confusing...

Thanx For Your Time,,,
This Board Rox!
Gene

Yes, I thought I could repartition the exFAT Sandisk. In win 7 I couldn't do it through disk management. Then I tried my trusty MiniPartition 8 and it left me no choices. Maybe I will plug it into the new Win 10 Pro laptop and see if I get more Joy through Disk Management.
I have no programs on the new laptop yet so I will be limited to disk management. Thank You For Your Reply

Still Swingin' Over Here...

Your external ssd is not compatible with the trim command. It is therefore advisable to leave the exFAT file system because the allocation unit size is 128 KB by default. This is what I saw on the internet because I have to buy an external ssd, for the moment I will not take a non TRIM compatible ssd ie UASP.

Open a Command Prompt with Administrator Privileges and run the following:

diskpart
list disk
select disk # <- replace # with the actual number of the external SSD
clean <- This will erase the disk selected above. Make sure it is the external SSD!
convert mbr
create partition pri size=476672
format fs=exfat quick
assign
create partiton pri
format fs=exfat quick
assign
exit
exit

I was wrong, your ssd is compatible with the TRIM command. To activate it, it must be formatted in NTFS. For image backups I believe it is better to choose NTFS.
It is the ssd sandisk extreme (non nvme version) which is not TRIM compatible.

Why the need to split the external SSD into 2 partitions?

Is there some reason you need to use exFAT at all---rather than NTFS?

thomaseg1 said:

I have a 128 gig set up Macrium rescue Fat 32 and the other NTFS with an drive image on it

Is the OP using the portable Sandisk 1 TB SSD as a Macrium bootable rescue disk??

Or as a general storage space to keep Macrium mrimg files and whatever else?