This post exists mostly to aid myself for when I buy new drives for my home server. It's a quick and easy way to create an ext4 filesystem over the entire drive.
To go through this post, you'll need to know the name of your drive.
```bash
sudo fdisk -l
```
or
```bash
lsblk
```
The drive is most likely one of the larger devices with no partitions set. It'll likely be of the format `/dev/sdX`.
To begin, we'll have to set the label. Here we'll use `gpt`.
```bash
sudo parted /dev/sdX mklabel gpt
```
Then we can create a primary partition formatted with ext4 covering the entire device.
```bash
sudo parted -a opt /dev/sdX mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%
```
Now we can let `ext4` format the drive,
```bash
sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX
```
I like to set up my mount points to be `/mnt/data/N` where N is the number of the drive I'm working with.
```bash
sudo mkdir /mnt/data/N
```
To temporarily mount it, just to make sure it works you can run
```bash
sudo mount /dev/sdX /mnt/data/N
```
You can unmount it with `umount`
```bash
sudo umount /dev/sdX
```
When you're ready to make it permanent, we'll have to edit the `/etc/fstab` file. We should note the drive by its UUID so that it's not dependent on the slot the hard drive sits in. You can find it by running this command
```bash
lsblk -o UUID /dev/sdX1
```
Now you can append your `/etc/fstab` with the following:
