To quickly set up a drive up as a single ext4 partition...
View detected devices of class "DISK"
lshw -C disk
View existing partition table(s)
fdisk -l
Edit the partition table for my chosen device (in this case, "sdx")

fdisk /dev/sdx
Within FDISK, press:
d ...to delete the current partition
n ...to create a new partition
p ...to specify it as a PRIMARY partition
1 ...to set it as the 1ST primary partition
w ...to write the changes.
Display the new partition table:
fdisk -lmo
Format the new partition's filesystem as type ext4
mkfs -t ext4 /dev/sdx1
Create a new directory where the new drive will mount into:
mkdir /storage
mount /dev/sdx1 /storage
TUNING

Remove reserved blocks (i.e. set to 0%), since this drive is just for user data
tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdx1
Since server is on UPS, Set write-back so apps don't wait for actual disk writes
tune2fs -o journal_data_writeback /dev/sdx1
Mount at boot up using /etc/fstab and also set write-back policy
vi /etc/fstab
Find (or add) the relevant line in fstab for your drive. Parameters in fstab are separated by white space, for example the drive described above might appear as:
/dev/sdx1 /storage ext4 relatime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
The first parameter identifies the partition (either by /dev/ or a long UUID);
The second parameter is the path the partition will be mounted to;
Third is the filesystem type;
The fourth parameter contains the options;
Fifth is the dump schedule for backups; and,
The sixth parameter is pass-number (used to control fsck order).
Change the options (4th parameter) to:

noatime,nodiratime,data=writeback,barrier=0,nobh,errors=remount-ro
Reboot to check that everything went well.
Remember these commands are destructive! Have backups and be careful!