17.2. Adding Disks
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## 17.2. Adding Disks

Originally contributed by David O'Brien.

This section describes how to add a new SATA disk to a machine that currently only has a single drive. First, turn off the computer and install the drive in the computer following the instructions of the computer, controller, and drive manufacturers. Reboot the system and become `root`.

Inspect `/var/run/dmesg.boot` to ensure the new disk was found. In this example, the newly added SATA drive will appear as `ada1`.

For this example, a single large partition will be created on the new disk. The GPT partitioning scheme will be used in preference to the older and less versatile MBR scheme.

### Note:

If the disk to be added is not blank, old partition information can be removed with `gpart delete`. See gpart(8) for details.

The partition scheme is created, and then a single partition is added. To improve performance on newer disks with larger hardware block sizes, the partition is aligned to one megabyte boundaries:

    # gpart create -s GPT ada1
    # gpart add -t freebsd-ufs -a 1M ada1

Depending on use, several smaller partitions may be desired. See gpart(8) for options to create partitions smaller than a whole disk.

The disk partition information can be viewed with `gpart show`:

    % gpart show ada1
    =>        34  1465146988  ada1  GPT  (699G)
              34        2014        - free -  (1.0M)
            2048  1465143296     1  freebsd-ufs  (699G)
      1465145344        1678        - free -  (839K)

A file system is created in the new partition on the new disk:

    # newfs -U /dev/ada1p1

An empty directory is created as a mountpoint, a location for mounting the new disk in the original disk's file system:

    # mkdir /newdisk

Finally, an entry is added to `/etc/fstab` so the new disk will be mounted automatically at startup:

    /dev/ada1p1	/newdisk	ufs	rw	2	2

The new disk can be mounted manually, without restarting the system:

    # mount /newdisk

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