Missing space on ext4

[MarkTrent]

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Hello,

I formatted a 2TB hard drive using ext4, and disabled both the journal and block reservation at creation to maximise my storage space. This worked great and after formatting, my hdd had only 64mb used by the filesystem (half as much as if I'd formatted it as NTFS).

I then copied 1.3TB of data from a 2TB NTFS hard drive onto the fresh drive. After completion I've checked my drive and the ext4 drive has 33.7GB less space available than the NTFS drive, both containing the exact same files (apart from the lost+found directory). I dismissed myself and ran the commands to disable journaling and set the reserved blocks to 0% again, thinking I must've forgotten to do this originally, but it turns out I had indeed done this when I first formatted the drive.

Unfortunately I rebooted after the transfer before I checked the disk spaces, so I can't be sure wether the space was missing directly after the transfer, or if it occurred after the restart. Does anyone know where the space has gone?

I'm quite new to Linux, and I just want a file system that gives me the low space overheads of NTFS, but with good speed on Linux. Is there a better filesystem I should be using? It's used as a media storage drive. (Coming from Windows, I originally formatted the new drive as NTFS but found it had slow transfer speeds so switched to ext4; went from 15mb/s --> 115 mb/s)

Thanks for any info,
Mark

[reed9]

By default ext4 will reserve 5% of the disk space. You can alter this using tune2fs.

How To Free Reserved Space On EXT4 Partitions Odzangba Kafui Dake’s Blog

[Rubberman]

Linux file systems reserver 5-10% of the space for root so that when users jam the drive full of stuff, the administrator still has room to clean stuff up. As Reed9 said, you can alter that with tune2fs for ext2/3/4 file systems.

[MarkTrent]

Hi, thanks for the replies, but the system reserved space was set to 0% when I formatted the drive, and I also performed the action again afterwards just in case, so I know that's not the problem.

[reed9]

Can you post the output of

sudo fdisk -l

And you're sure it's not a result of the manufacturer misreporting size (using base 10 instead of base 2)?

[MarkTrent]

Disk /dev/sda: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
16 heads, 63 sectors/track, 3876021 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 1008 * 512 = 516096 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x29b67112

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1     3876018  1953513040+   7  HPFS/NTFS

WARNING: GPT (GUID Partition Table) detected on '/dev/sdc'! The util fdisk doesn't support GPT. Use GNU Parted.


Disk /dev/sdc: 2000.4 GB, 2000398934016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 243201 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x00000000

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1               1      243202  1953514583+  ee  GPT

[reed9]

Sorry, forgot to add, can you also post

df -h

[coopstah13]

could it because of the GPT partition type? I hadn't even heard of that until today, usually I just select "Linux" which should have been default

[reed9]

could it because of the GPT partition type? I hadn't even heard of that until today, usually I just select "Linux" which should have been default

GPT looks to be relatively new.

From what I can find, it requires 16,384 bytes to be reserved for the partition table, so that shouldn't account for the GBs missing.

[MarkTrent]

Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdf2             5.4G  3.7G  1.4G  73% /
none                  1.3G  252K  1.3G   1% /dev
none                  1.3G  140K  1.3G   1% /dev/shm
none                  1.3G  316K  1.3G   1% /var/run
none                  1.3G     0  1.3G   0% /var/lock
/dev/sdf1             2.0G  624K  2.0G   1% /media/HTPC
/dev/sda1             1.9T  1.3T  584G  69% /media/Movies (Old)
/dev/sdc1             1.8T  1.3T  550G  71% /media/Movies

I see the difference there now. It's strange, in both GParted and when viewing the Properties of each hdd in Ubuntu they are both displayed as being 1.82TB