To make partitions larger than 2TB, a normal DOS partition table will not work. We have to use a GPT partition table to support +2TB partitions. This is easily done with the parted tool. Below we label the /dev/sdb device as GPT and create one large partition (of type XFS in this case) which spans the entire disk:
parted /dev/sdb mklabel gpt mkpart primary xfs 1 -1 quit
You need XFS if you want +16TB filesystems for now… ext4 will work up to 12TB, but should support larger partitions anytime soon . Here we format the partition as a XFS filesystem:
mkfs.xfs -d name=/dev/sdb1 -L export
The device is now ready to mount. The required tools can be installed on a Debian/Ubuntu distribution with:
apt-get install parted xfsprogs