Formatting an external hard drive for storage on Linux

External hard disk drives have been reducing in the shops a lot lately, with terabytes now at affordable prices. To format these on Linux it's recommended to use gnome-disks (simply 'Disks' on the Linux Mint start menu).

• Use NTFS file system type if you want to be able to read on other machines, rather than ext4 which is only Linux
  • (if you're using a hard drive to transfer things between computers this portability probably matters)
• Some WD products have encryption built into the firmware which can't be removed (says so on their site), so just reformat the standard partition
• sudo apt-get install gdisk prevents a partitioning error described here
• Note that searching for variants of "format hard drive linux" will bring up guides for those looking to run Linux on a USB drive, so will discuss formatting primary partitions - not what you want here