Hello and welcome to AskUbuntu.
Use gparted
to open a very useful interface that will allow you to format the drive in any way you want (create new partitions, merge or move existing ones, etc.). When you go through the options, format it to EXT4 (latest linux standard) and make sure you tick the option to mount it when starting up the computer. You will have to give it a specific mount point, say /media
or /backup
. This you will access through the file manager using that folder name. Note, however, that this will create a separate disc partition.
Instead, if you are new to linux, what I would suggest is that you grow the current disc partition to include that space. If you already created partitions when you started (typically swap
, /
and /home
will be the fundamental partitions) I suggest you append the extra space to /home
.
Warning: the procedure of either creating a new partition or appending the space to an existing partition will delete ALL the files currently in that partition. This process is irreversible.
GParted should be installed by default. Here is some additional information about GParted.