I am setting up an external hard drive to backup several computers to, and I want to keep its contents private by using VeraCrypt. I don't want to encrypt the entire drive because then when it's inserted, Windows shows a popup asking if I want to format it, which I find annoying. Instead I have formatted it as a regular exFAT drive, and am currently creating a VeraCrypt file container on it that is almost as large as the drive: the drive is 3.63 TB and the file container is 3.61 TB, leaving 25.8 GB free.
Doing it this way also allows me to have a small amount of unencrypted space on the drive where, for example, I can store install files for VeraCrypt.
I know that normally it's not good to keep a drive almost full because then there isn't space for pagefiles and the data can get fragmented. However this is an external, so there are no pagefiles, and once the VeraCrypt file container is initially created, I don't see how it could ever get fragmented.
So, will I be OK? Or are there issues with this setup?