A new drive is just empty space, to use it you need to create a 'partition', which is a map of the area of drive to be used and it marks out the space it occupies. You can have more than one partition on a drive, and that partition can have slightly different properties [best to stay with Primary partitions unless you have good reason to change it]. Each partition can then be 'formated' in a particular way and allocated a 'logical drive letter'. Formatting creates the file system to be used - under Windows it's normally the NTFS system.
Why would you partition the drive? Well, it sort of creates discrete areas on the drive which the computer can work with independantly. The separate partitions appear under Windows as 'logical' drives - D:, E:, and F: for example - even though they're all on the same hard disk. They are formatted separately, have their own MFT (Master File Table or index system) and therefore corruption of one would not affect the other two. Doing this avoids having all your eggs in one basket as it were... There's lots of caveats and reasons fo/against partitioning a large drive but on balance it's seen as a Good Thing to do.
and a 1TB WD Green, in the manual it says to partition the drive, why would you do this? My Dad mentioned it the other day, something about bad sectors?
