Notes on the ext4 filesystem

If you run a simple mkfs.ext4 against a newly minted partition or logical volume you’ll notice quite a bit of background churn on the disk. From the Internets: > the “ext4lazyinit” kernel process writes at up to 16,000kB/s to the device and thereby uses a great deal of the hard disk’s bandwidth

To avoid this lazy init you can run:

mkfs.ext4 -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0 /dev/path/to/disk