Working with several portable USB devices on one computer can be quite complicated when you consider that Windows is assigning the next free drive letter to a device that gets connected. This can lead to some confusion as drive letters may change depending on how USB devices are connected to the system.
A great tip that I would like to pass on is to assign USB drives to folders instead. When you do that, you will notice that – known – USB drivers are no longer assigned their own drive letter whenever you connect them to the system but a folder instead.
What I did was to create a main folder on my E: drive which I named USB. I then assigned all my USB devices to subfolders of that folder which led to less confusion on my part. (Create the subfolders before continuing). You need to create the folder structure first before you can assign the USB drives to them.
Connect your USB devices to the computer afterwards. Once you have created the folders and connected the devices, read on.
Press Windows R, type diskmgmt.msc and hit enter. This opens the Disk Management configuration that should display all drives and devices currently connected to your computer. Please note that you may get a UAC prompt on newer versions of the Windows operating system which you need to accept before the program window is loaded.
Pick an USB device from the list and right-click that entry. Select Change Drive Letter and Paths from the menu.
This should open a new window that displays the current drive letter of the device and three buttons at the bottom: Add, Change and Remove.
Click on the Add button, select “mount into the following empty NTFS folder” and click on browse.
Now navigate to the subfolder that you want to assign the usb drive to and confirm the assignment. The USB drive will from now on be accessible from that folder as well if it is connected to the computer.
You can remove the drive letter if you want that by selecting it in the main window and clicking on Remove.