First and foremost:

!! WARNING !!

These commands are EXAMPLES. DELETING partitions, MODIFYING and FORMATTING filesystems destroys data and/or may prevent your machine from booting.  Make backups.  Use at own risk.   Try on a machine you don't mind losing all data on. caveat admin.

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To quickly set up a drive up as a single ext4 partition...

1. View detected devices of class "DISK"

   
   
   

   lshw -C disk
   
   




2. View existing partition table(s)

   
   
   

   fdisk -l
   
   




3. Edit the partition table for my chosen device (in this case, "sdx")

   
   
   

   fdisk /dev/sdx
   
   

   
   
   

   Within FDISK, press:

   
   
   
   
   

   • d ...to delete the current partition

   
   

   • n ...to create a new partition

   
   

   • p ...to specify it as a PRIMARY partition

   
   

   • 1 ...to set it as the 1ST primary partition

   
   

   • w ...to write the changes.

   
   



4. Display the new partition table:

   
   
   

   fdisk -l
   
   




5. Format the new partition's filesystem as type ext4

   
   
   

   mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdx1
   
   




6. Create a new directory where the new drive will mount into:

   
   
   

   mkdir /storage
   
   mount /dev/sdx1 /storage
   
   

TUNING

1. Remove reserved blocks (i.e. set to 0%), since this drive is just for user data

   
   
   

   tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdx1
   
   




2. Since server is on UPS, Set write-back so apps don't wait for actual disk writes

   
   
   

   tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdx1
   
   




3. Mount at boot up using /etc/fstab and also set write-back policy

   
   
   

   vi /etc/fstab
   
   




4. Find (or add) the relevant line in fstab for your drive. Parameters in fstab are separated by white space, for example the drive described above might appear as:

   
   
   

   /dev/sdx1 /storage ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
   
   

   
   
   
   
   
   • The first parameter identifies the partition (either by /dev/ or a long UUID);
   
   
   • The second parameter is the path the partition will be mounted to;
   
   
   • Third is the filesystem type;
   
   
   • The fourth parameter contains the options;
   
   
   • Fifth is the dump schedule for backups; and,
   
   
   • The sixth parameter is pass-number (used to control fsck order).
   
   

Change the options (4th parameter) to:

noatime,nodiratime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,errors=remount-ro

Reboot to check that everything went well.

Remember these commands are destructive! Have backups and be careful!