Which parameters are best suited for formating an external HDD with ext4

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I chose a rather difficult route to format a 2TB sized HDD with ext4. Normally I would make due with a partition gui and call it a day. But when doing so the initialization of the hard drive would take ages and I simply asked myself whether this is absolutely necessary. I dont know much about file systems compared to a seasoned sysadmin but I can still find my way around man pages and thats all fine and all. But with the following command I am a bit skeptical.

sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdx -O sparse_super,large_file -m 3 -T largefile4

The HDD is in an external one with an enclosure and it will be primarily used for backups. Rather big files and very few smaller ones though there are some. When going with the defaults, mkfs chooses a rather conservative approach, I am also inclined to think that those defaults were choosen with OS (files and usage) in mind but I might be wrong here.

Nonetheless I would be interested to know how you guys chose to format external HDDs…input is much appreciated.

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Well, I finally went with

#mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdx -V -m 0 -T largefile

which is a compromise I can live with. the other options were defaults anyway and the largefile argument widens the bytes-per-inode ratio to 1 MiB… I think this might just do the trick

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that works perfect, did you make the GPT table first to fully encompass the drive?

EXT4 is perfect for removable media as it is journaling, but that’s an fstab mounting flag to disable (don’t)

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