Storage Drives

Format Storage Drives

If you are coming from the Windows ecosystem, your hard drives may be formatted for Windows using the FAT, ExFAT or NTFS file system. 

For the best performance and stability, we recommend re-formatting these storage disks using the Linux ext4 file system. 

Re-install all disk drives.
Make sure to shut down your computer and re-connect any disk drives that were unplugged during the Debian installation.

While Debian can support writing to NTFS disks using the ntfs-3g software, it can decrease overall performance and access speeds.  FAT and ExFAT file systems have native support within Debian, but are not an ideal server file system due to technical limitations.  If possible, important data should be copied to an alternate disk so that it can be reformatted as ext4.

Reformatting will erase the disk drive.
You will irrecoverably lose data stored on this drive.

We will be opening the "Disks" application from the Start Menu, under the "Accessories" category.

This application can be used to verify that the disk is formatted using the FAT, ExFAT or NTFS file system.  Once we've done that, we can format the disk drive using the Linux ext4 file system for improved performance and reliability.

When we select on the 1.0TB hard drive listed, we will see an overview of the partitions on this disk.  There is a small 210MB EFI partition used for system files and a 1000GB partition that takes up the rest of the space.  We can also see that the "Storage" partition is formatted using the NTFS file system.

With the Storage partition selected, we select the red 'minus' icon to 'Delete selected partition'.  We will receive a warning that all data on the partition will be erased.  Once you are certain there is no important data on that partition, you can hit 'Delete'.

If there are other data partitions, aside from the EFI partition, we will need to follow this process to remove them.  After all the partitions have been removed from the disk, you will be presented with 1000GB of "Free Space" for us to create a new partition.

By selecting "Free Space", we are presented with a 'plus' icon that allows us to "Create partition in unallocated space". 

Clicking this button will open a partition creation wizard.  First, we need to select how much space the partition will occupy.  For this disk, we want the partition to fill the entire space so we will leave it at the default setting.  Hit 'Next'.

Now, we will need to give a name to the partition and choose the file system type. This name can be anything you want, but simple descriptive language is usually best.  We will name the partition "Storage" and choose the Type "Internal disk for use with Linux systems only (Ext4)". 

Optionally, you can choose to securely write over all the data that was stored on the drive.  We do not want to encrypt our volume with LUKS.

Once we hit 'Create', it will begin to format the disk with the new partition.

Once it's completed the format process, you will have a new 'Storage' partition using the Ext4 file system.

Now, we can move on to mounting these storage disks at a permanent and centralized location.