External hard disk- Drive letter assignment

For few weeks I am facing a very annoying problem assigning drive letters to my external USB hard disks. I have two internal SSD drives. The first one is a 2TB drive with two partitions: C: is my windows and D: is data. On the second SSD I have one partition: E: Games. I also regularly use 3 external USB Drives: One 500GB SSD where I have my VST instruments That I assign as F: and two exactly same WD 5TB with Movies and Music on them. I want these two WDs to have G: assigned to them as my Emby library has been setup to use G: as path for them. For years I would manually assign G: to these drives once in Windows disk manager and windows would always auto assign G: to both of them. But for few weeks every time I connect them , one will be assigned to G: and the other one to F: and I need to make the change manually every time!

I don't know if anything has changed in windows managing letter assignment? Is there anyway I can make this work like before and have them both be assigned to G: ?

Some time ago I had the same problem. Rather than disk management to assign my static drive letters, I use Aoemi Partition Assistant but Disk Management should do the same thing. Dedicated drive letters never stuck for me until I used higher drive letters in the alphabet. (ex: Q, R, S on one drive,T, U, V on another, and X, Y, Z on a third one.) Once I did that, everything stuck. Why it made a difference, I don't know..But I don't think you can assign both the same drive letter without running into issues.I think when you assign a drive letter, it's tied to the disk info in some way. eg: hardware id. Even though the disks are identical, they have different ids from the manufacturer so disk management sees them as different.

Every time you go into DM and change drive letter, you are associating that disk id to G which breaks the association with the other disk until you go back into DM and associate the second disk with G again..

Something else that may have something to do with it is whether DM recognizes the disks as fixed or removable. One of my external drives is in an enclosure. DM recognizes it as a fixed drive rather than removable. Again, why, I do not know.

This link may be useful:


DriveLetterView is a simple utility that allows you to view the list of all drive letter assignments in your system, including local drives, remote network drives, CD/DVD drives, and USB drives - even if they are not currently plugged.

It also allows you to easily change a drive letter of USB devices and remote network shares, as well as to delete a drive letter of USB device that is not plugged.

@glasskuter: Thanks a lot for your reply. It all makes sense. Only strange thing is that for years I didn't have this problem and both WD hard disks would be assigned to G: automatically once I manually changed them to G: once. Most PCs are probably hunted and there is often a ghost inside them trying to make you go crazy!

@zbook: Thanks a lot! This little software is very useful. At least it allow me to change drive letter faster then with the original windows Disk Manager.

You're welcome.