I recently bought a 2TB NVME SSD drive which I plan to install on my Linux Mint desktop. I have been taking a ton of pictures lately with my old Nikon D700 DSLR camera and I can use the extra space. Since the new drive is unformatted, here were the steps that I took to get it working on my desktop. This how-to assumes that I have installed the new NVME drive on your motherboard successfully.

The first thing to do is to find out the device name. It shows up as a 1.8TB disk on my desktop.

lsblk
nvme0n1 259:0    0   1.8T  0 disk

Check if it’s formatted. It should be empty. If not, it will display the file system type.

sudo file -s /dev/nvme0n1

If empty.

/dev/nvme0n1: data

If formatted with XFS.

/dev/nvme0n1: SGI XFS filesystem data (blksz 4096, inosz 512, v2 dirs)

Since it’s empty, let’s format the drive. I will use XFS as the file system.

mkfs -t xfs /dev/nvme0n1

Let’s mount the drive after formatting. I will use the Nikon directory in my home directory as the mount volume.

mkdir ~/Nikon
sudo mount /dev/nvme0n1 /home/ulysses/Nikon

Let’s unmount it temporarily.

sudo umount /home/ulysses/Nikon

Next, I will add an entry to the /etc/fstab to make the drive mount permanent after each reboot. Get the UUID of the new drive using the blkid command.

sudo blkid

Now edit the /etc/fstab file to add the new volume entry.

vi /etc/fstab

The entry will look similar to this. Enter the UUID by replacing the x’s.

UUID=xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx /home/ulysses/Nikon          xfs        defaults            0 0

Test it by mounting all.

sudo mount -a

If there are no errors, mount was successful. You can check by running the df command.

df -Th

It should display something similar to below. I already have 5% data on the drive.

/dev/nvme0n1        xfs        1.9T   83G  1.8T   5% /home/ulysses/Nikon

Since everything looks good, I can now safely reboot.

sudo shutdown -r