Done this many times now with 3.5in hdd's, but now with a Seagate One Touch 4T 2.5in usb hdd. In GParted the existing setup shows two partitions, EFI System Partition formatted in fat32, and the second partition in exfat. Normally when dealing with drives formatted in NTFS I delete all partitions and then create one partition formatted in ext4 and then set permissions. I will not be using this drive with Win or Mac. Is it safe to delete the EFI System Partition before I repartition? Will currently be used with older Thinkpads, T410 and T420 and Lenovo M73 desktop (all i5 vintage).

Do it - the EFI is just a partition. Happens to be required if you want to boot from it on a [U]EFI system in EFI mode, but for a data disk, do as you always did.

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Thanks for the confirmation.

New 2TB USB hdd bought today, Seagate model SRD0VN2 p/n 3FPAPD-500

For data backup on Ubuntu 20.04 system. Seagate site says for Win/Mac first get software to enable its password security feature.
As I don't need or want that, I'm using it as is.

I want to rename its label. Usually I go to Ubuntu's Disks, unmount and edit filesystems. With this I get an error when I try.
In Disks looking at its Partition Type: NTFS/exFAT/HPFS Contents: exFAT (version 1.0)

Perhaps I should reformat to solely exFAT. I might just leave it as is. Irritating to be unable to change its label.