Properly mounting harddrives on Raspi (and by extension Linux)

README.md

Properly mounting harddrives on Raspi (and by extension Linux)

This guide is intended mostly for my own reference, but I figured it can be of use to others as well.

Conventions

/dev/sdxy is the device/partition to mount/label/..., eg. /dev/sda or /dev/sdb1.

Listing up what we've got

sudo blkid

returns a table like the following

/dev/mmcblk0p1: LABEL_FATBOOT="boot" LABEL="boot" UUID="37E2-62C3" BLOCK_SIZE="512" TYPE="vfat" PARTUUID="467086ff-01"
/dev/mmcblk0p2: LABEL="rootfs" UUID="6a932c1f-7335-42d9-9351-1b1b2ca538d4" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4" PARTUUID="467086ff-02"
/dev/sda: LABEL="TIME_MACHINE" UUID="10f1b8d9-6166-4dee-9f6f-bf71aa56379a" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/loop0: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/loop1: TYPE="squashfs"
/dev/sdb: LABEL="DATA_SERVER" UUID="409c8a4c-0629-4fde-b049-82eff80fe308" BLOCK_SIZE="4096" TYPE="ext4"

Hard drives have UUID

Partitions have PARTUUID

Hard drives and partitions can have LABEL

Label makes it the easiest to reference. Label the harddrives/partitions properly.

Partitioning

List partitions

fdisk -l

Partition using fdisk

sudo fdisk /dev/sdx

Partition using parted

sudo parted /dev/sdx

Formatting

EXT4

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdxy -v Label

HFS+ (only for TimeMachine drives)

sudo mkfs.hfsplus /dev/sdxy -v Label

ZFS

(more involved, TODO)

Labeling

Labeling the device/partition makes it easier to retrieve it, and by extension referencing it in /etc/fstab

sudo e2label /dev/sdxy "HDD_LABEL"

Mounting

mkdir /mnt/mountpoint # by convention, mount stuff in /mnt.
mount /dev/sdxy /mnt/mountpoint

/etc/fstab

LABEL=HDD_LABEL   /mnt/mountpoint   ext4    defaults,noatime  0       2

Reference: fstab documentation