I have recently inherited at 16TB disk array and wanted to use it to provide slower, but connected storage for my iMAC, which has a 2TB SSD.

I decided that I wanted to use ext4 as my file system (I’m running Mint Linux), but when trying to partition the drive (showing 14.6TB of usable data) I found that I was not able to create a partition larger than 2TB.

Turns out after a little research that Ubuntu and therefore LinuxMint 19 (my favourite) comes with gdisk, which pretty much functions exactly the same way as fdisk.

So,

gdisk /dev/sdX

create the partition table that you want, and then start to format the partitions.

mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdX1