In case you want to permanently mount an (Amazon EBS for instance) volume on a machine.

Prepare

List partitions and read out unmounted volume:

sudo lsblk

In this case, sdb is the volume we want to mount. Format the volume with a proper filesystem, ext4:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -F -E lazy_itable_init=0,lazy_journal_init=0,discard /dev/sdb

Create the directory you want to mount to and mount:

sudo mkdir -p /mnt/disks/data
sudo mount -o discard,defaults /dev/sdb /mnt/disks/data

Optionally set correct permissions:

sudo chmod a+w /mnt/disks/data

At this point, your mounted volume is ready to use.

Permament

In order to have the volume mounted each time we restart the system, setup automount in fstab.

First make a backup of the existing fstab file:

sudo cp /etc/fstab /etc/fstab.backup

Read out the UUID of the device.

sudo blkid /dev/sdb

Open the fstab file:

sudo vim /etc/fstab

Add the following line to the file. Replace #ID# with the UUID of the device.

UUID=#ID# /mnt/disks/data ext4 discard,defaults,nofail 0 2