External Hard Drive are almost similar to a Internal Hard Drives. You can Partition your external drives with the same approach to Internal Hard Drive.
Recently i Purchased an 1 TB Seagate Backup Plus External Hard Drive from Flipkart for Rs.5150. Note : After my purchase the next day the price went to 5000. something to note. Is Flipkart reducing the price after each sale?
Partitioning Tools :
The simple way is to use your Disk Management Tools in Windows. You can access this from Start -> Run->MMC->Add/Remove Snapshot Dialog
Select the External Disk in the Disk Management Screen and Select Shrink Volume to create new Partitions. This is because by default it has only 1 Partition in Segate Backup Plus. After the first shrink you will get the First partition. Then you repeat them to create subsequent partition as much you want.
File System Formats :
After shrinking(Partitioning) you will get a new space called UnAllocated Space. You can format this with any of the filesystem. FAT32,ext32,NTFS. These are the only options available in Windows. I tried with Windows 7.
If you have plans to use this External Hard Drive to be used in both MAC and Windows, then Its recommended that you create separate Partition to be used in MAC system. The default file system of MAC is MAC OS Extended Journaled File System. So once you have created the Partition, use the Disk Utility in MAC OS to format the Unallocated space with the Journaled file system. This helps you to use the External HardDisk with full MAC OS compatible for Backup, Time Machine etc.
Note : NTFS file system in the External Hard Drive can also be accessed from MAC as Seagate gives you a Free Software Paragon which helps you to explore and manipulate windows filesystem from MAC OS and Vice Versa.
See my Next Post, Moving iPhoto Library to External Hard Drive