We have a combination Plex Media/Minecraft/Archive server that we’ve had since we purchased our first 6TB Hard Drive on December 30, 2019 ($99.99 at the time). After some time we upgraded to our massive 14TB Hard Drive ($293.00 at the time) on October 16, 2021. It took a bit over a couple years to fill things up, and now we recently invested into a 16TB Hard Drive ($279.00 at purchase) to continue our storage needs.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 457G 288G 169G 64% /
/dev/sda1 1014M 202M 813M 20% /boot
/dev/sdd1 13T 12T 52G 100% /mnt/usb14
/dev/sdc1 5.5T 4.3T 962G 82% /mnt/usb03
Now it’s time to get this new drive ready for usage.
Step 1: Plug it in
Plug it in. 3 USB devices and 2 ports, so I had to get a USB 2.0 hub. The PC itself only has 2.0 hubs, so we go with what we got.
Step 2: Boot things up
With the USB hub things might’ve been a bit dodgy, but after booting up, verifying all my previous volumes mounted fine and seeing that it find the third drive gave me a sigh of relief.
Step 3: Partition the new drive
fdisk -l showed me that the system recognized the new volume. In this case this Seagate was preset for Windows users, and that wasn’t quite my style.
Disk /dev/sdb: 14.6 TiB, 16000900660736 bytes, 31251759103 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 4096 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 4096 bytes / 4096 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: 01000000-0000-0000-4E54-31373537314C
Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sdb1 40 409639 409600 200M EFI System
/dev/sdb2 411648 31251757055 31251345408 14.6T Microsoft basic datad twice to delete the partitions, the creating the new one rendered me one 14.6TB Linux Partition.
v, then w, and then I’m ready to create and mount this.
Step 4: format my partition
My other disks are ext4, so mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdb1 is going to be my go-to command.
Step 5: mounting the new partition
My system is to place the “size” as the number in /mnt/usbXX, so this will be mounted as /mnt/usb16. I also have to find the uuid in /dev/disk/by-uuid/ so I can make sure this disk will always be reliably mounted.
Setting the correct parameters in /etc/fstab and mount -a tells me I’m fairly done.
$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda3 457G 288G 169G 64% /
/dev/sda1 1014M 202M 813M 20% /boot
/dev/sdd1 13T 12T 52G 100% /mnt/usb14
/dev/sdc1 5.5T 4.3T 962G 82% /mnt/usb03
/dev/sdb1 15T 19M 14T 1% /mnt/usb16
Step 6: Move things around
Now it’s time to move things around…
otherwise, ALL DONE!