It is simple, here is what you need to know
You can format it EXT4, but ext2 and ext3 are also OK ! ext2 and ext3 allow up to 16TB disks, and file sizes of up to 2TB, ext4 allows much more.
Any linux kernel newer than 2.6.31 should work just fine with “Advanced format” drives using the exact same steps in this article.
MBR only supports 2TB drives, you need GPT, so let us get started
1- apt-get update
2- apt get install parted
3- parted /dev/sdc
4- mklabel gpt
5- Answer yes to: Warning: The existing disk label on /dev/sdb will be destroyed and all data on this disk will be lost. Do you want to continue?
Yes/No? yes
6- mkpart primary ext4 0% 100% (to make a partition as big as the disk (will occupy starting from first megabyte (for alignment) to the end of disk))
7- quit
FYI, if you want multiple partitions, here are the 2 lines that should replace step 6
6- mkpart primary ext4 0% 40%
6- mkpart primary ext4 40% 100%
and remember to format both (sdc1 and sdc2) when you are done with parted
Now to formatting the drive
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdc1
Before mounting it, i like ext4, but i don’t want a journaling OS on this drive that is not the system drive, so i will need do a few things to the drive first
Lazy writeback
tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdc1
No Journaling
tune2fs -O ^has_journal /dev/sdc1
Now to check what we have
dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 |grep 'Filesystem features'
Or maybe if you want the whole thing on the screen
dumpe2fs /dev/sdc1 |more
if has_journal option exist when executing the first – you have journal on the file system
And there we are, Now we need to mount it at boot time by adding it to fstab, to do that, we will need the disk’s unique ID !
8- Now executing the following command will give you the unique ID of this new partition for use with fstab (The disk list we will edit below in step 10)
blkid /dev/sdc1
9- create the directory where you want to mount your hard disk, for example
mkdir /hds
mkdir /hds/3tb
10- Now, we add the following line to fstab, notice that noatime increases performance, but some applications might need or rely on it. postfix does not and i have verified that.
UUID=b7a491b1-a690-468f-882f-fbb4ac0a3b53 /hds/3tb ext4 defaults,noatime 0 1
defaults and noatime are but only a couple of options, here are more options that you can add
nofail = If the disk is not present, continue booting
nobootwait = Limit the amount of time you plan to wait
noauto = Don’t mount it until I issue a “mount /dev/sdb1”, or mount “/hds/thisdisk” command
11- Now execute
mount -a
You are done,. if you execute
df -h
You should see your 2+TB hard drive in there !
To make sure the drive is aligned correctly, i like to write a file on it and see how fast that goes… so let us use a 2GB file
dd if=/dev/zero of=/hds/WD2000_3/deleteme.img bs=1M count=2000
Outcome came out (for a western digital black 2TB)
First run: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 5.94739 s, 353 MB/s
Consecutive runs: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 11.1405 s, 188 MB/s
Outcome came out for a western digital green 3TB
First run: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 8.32337 s, 252 MB/s
Consecutive runs: 2097152000 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 14.376 s, 146 MB/s
the consecutive runs give close results, what i printed here is the average