Question about partitioning a 4TB drive
 

Hello All;
I am building a Linux media server in my home and I am new to Linux.

Right now I am at the point where I am partitioning and formatting each of my 4TB drives.

I ran sudo parted on /etc/sdb
Then I set mklabel to gpt.

Now my question is about mkpart.

In order to use the full 4TB disk for data (Only one partition)

Do I set mkpart primary 0GB 3725GB
or
do I set mkpart primary 0GB 4000GB?

I don't want to enter a larger capacity than my disk will allow but I also want to be sure I am taking advantage of all of the available space.

Thanks.

Tim

Parted is (now) pretty smart - do what you think will work; maybe better to use 0% and 100%; saves all the algebra angst.
Start it with "-a optimal" to force alignment.

Hello and welcome to LQ.

well it is YOUR hardware

i would use 4 partitions

but for a big drive and ONE partition ( 4 tb's is big )
you need to use GPT
then a rather NEW!!!! operating system with a new version of fdisk

older versions of fdisk and parted or gparted can NOT read the GPT partition table

You need to use the GPT partitioning scheme for drives > 2TB. With various quirks when you do use GPT depending on the age of your utilities.

Not true.
If you need partition(s) greater than 2G you need gpt - but a 4G disk may be partitioned to multiples each less than 2G using classic MBR partitioning.

How is that MBR partition table going to represent, in its 32-bit fields, the starting or ending LBA of a partition that lies beyond the 2TB boundary?

Excellent question. My apologies to @Shadow_7.

I think you mean TB... I've never had any issues using MBR on any of my disks, and all of my partitions are greater than 2GB.