Fastest Ext4 Options

When I got a new external hard drive for storing mp3s, recorded TV shows, etc, I wanted to know how to set it up most optimally (using the ext4 filesystem). I ended up following Luca Spiller's Ext4 Options for a Media Drive for the most part, but with a few tweaks:

Formatting the Drive

After plugging in the hard drive and running sudo fdisk -l to check what name the OS had assigned it (/dev/sdb1), I formatted the drive with the following options: -m 0 to create no extra room for root (I don't intend to use it as a boot drive); and -L bb to assign it a label of bb (so I can reference it by label in my /etc/fstab):

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -L bb /dev/sdb1

Configuring the Drive Options

Then I updated my /etc/fstab configuration with an entry for the new drive. Beyond the filesystem permission options of user, rw, exec, and suid (the order of which is significant), and the noauto option (to ignore the drive when booting), I added some options that make writing data less safe — but faster. Use man mount to get a brief description of these and all other possible options:

LABEL=bb /mnt/bb ext4 user,rw,exec,suid,noauto,noatime,nobh,nobarrier,commit=60,data=writeback,journal_async_commit 0 0

If this was an internal hard drive, or one that I intended to have connected at all times, I would have skipped the permissions and noauto options (so as to use the default permissions and allow it to auto-mount at boot time), and would have just specified the performance options:

LABEL=bb /mnt/bb ext4 noatime,nobh,nobarrier,commit=60,data=writeback,journal_async_commit 0 2

Creating the Drive Mount Point

In /etc/fstab I had configured the drive's mount point as /mnt/bb, so I created it and set its owner to myself (so I could mount the drive as a regular user, since I had included the user option in the /etc/fstab config):

sudo mkdir /mnt/bb && sudo chown justin:justin /mnt/bb

Mounting the Drive

Now whenever I plug in the drive, I can mount it as a regular user; either via its label:

mount -L bb

Or via its mount point:

mount /mnt/bb