How to add a new disk drive

• Physically install the disk.
• Find the device id (e.g. /dev/hdb or /dev/sdb). Hardware browser or fdisk -l can help with this.
• Option 1: Create the partition table with fdisk (up to 2 TB):

fdisk /dev/sdb

("p" = print table, "n" = new partition, "w" = write table)

• Option 2: use parted (for big arrays):

parted /dev/sdb
(parted) mklabel gpt
(parted) print (showed size of disk to be 10.5TB)
(parted) mkpart primary xfs 0 -1 (use the whole disk)
(parted) quit

If mkpart complains about being improperly aligned, use "1 -1" instead of "0 -1".

• Format the partition(s):

mkfs.ext3 /dev/sdb1 (for ext3)
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1 (for ext4)
mkreiserfs /dev/hdb1 (for Reiser)
mkfs.xfs /dev/sdb1 (for XFS)

Note: For an XFS filesystem on a hardware RAID5 array with 15 disks and 256K stripe size, use this command:

mkfs.xfs -f -L export -d su=256k,sw=14 -l su=256k /dev/sdb1

This tells mkfs to label the filesystem "export", to use the native stripe size for the filesystem and the log, and that the stripe width is N-1=14 for a 15-disk array.

• Create the mount point:

mkdir /u1

• Add an entry to /etc/fstab. Something like

/dev/sdb1       /u1     ext3    defaults        0 2

(0 for no dump, 2 for second priority in fsck). Instead of defaults, use noatime,nodiratime for a big array.

• Mount the partition:

mount /u1

• To mount an existing disk (don't forget the partition number):

mount -t reiserfs /dev/hdb1 /data

Disk Labels

If device letters aren't always consistent, it may be useful to create disk labels and assign them in the fstab. To label an ext3 partition:

e2label /dev/sdb1 my_label

To label an xfs partition:

xfs_admin -L my_label /dev/sdb1

To read an existing xfs label:

xfs_admin -l /dev/sdb1

To refer to this in /etc/fstab:

LABEL=my_label   /u1   (etc.)