xternal hard drives have been the cheapest and accessible option when it comes to backing up data. Security has always been a crucial thing if you have saved important or personal files on your external hard drive. Putting up a password on your external hard drive is an ideal thing to do to lock out intruders.

Although you can achieve putting up a password and encryption on your external hard drive with 3rd party software like TrueCrypt, AxCrypt, or StorageCrypt, but this article will show you how to do that without a 3rd party software.

Before we go on, there are certain things you should have available. They are:

1. A computer (in our case, we are using a windows PC)
2. A Universal Serial Bus (USB) cable
3. And of course, the hard drive.

Go on and follow the steps keenly.

Step 1

• Switch on your PC and also the external hard drive.
• Connect the external hard drive to the PC using the USB cable.

Step 2

• On the PC, on the control panel. If you can’t locate the control panel, use the search bar and type in “control panel”. Click on it when it appears.
• Then, find “BitLocker” or simply type it in the search bar above to reveal it.

OR

• Simply use the search button close to the start button and type in “BitLocker”

Step 3

• In the BitLocker page, click on “Turn on BitLocker” for the hard drive that you want to encrypt.
• Tick the “use a password to unlock drive” option and set your preferred password. Then click ‘Next’.

Step 4

• Choose ‘save to a file’ to back up your recovery key.
• Select the folder you want your password to be saved to on your hard disk

Step 5

• After choosing your preferred folder, click on ‘start encryption’ and wait for the process to complete. Completion time varies based on hard drive sizes.
• Write or save your password in a place you can recall because your external hard drive would require it when next you or anyone want to access it.

That’s all! Are you facing any problems putting password on your external hard drive? You can leave a comment below or send us a private message using the chat bubble for assistance.

Did you successfully set your password on your external hard drive? We would also love to hear about it in the comments.