Hey everyone, I just installed a new 2TB SSD on my Debian system, and after formatting it with fdisk and creating the filesystem using `sudo mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1`, I noticed that it shows as 5% full with 95GB used, despite being empty. I know there's some overhead when formatting drives and that you don't always get the full advertised capacity, but this seems like a lot. The disk is showing no other partitions. Here's the output from `fdisk -l` so you can see the setup:
Disk /dev/sda: 1.86 TiB, 2048408248320 bytes, 4000797360 sectors
Disk model: PNY 2TB SATA SSD
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disklabel type: gpt
Disk identifier: B80847D1-6307-9C47-A179-E211591AFB5F
Is this amount of space loss normal for a new disk?
3 Answers
Yeah, the root reserve for ext4 is a bit outdated. It dates back to when drives were much smaller. If you're doing a lot of media file storage, setting that reserve to around 2GB makes sense, as filling up a filesystem completely can really slow it down. You might also want to consider optimizing your inode size when creating the filesystem if you're dealing with larger files.
If you're looking for even more space, you might want to consider trying btrfs as well!
The default for ext4 reserves 5% of blocks for root access, which probably explains that 95GB you're seeing used. You can adjust that with `tune2fs -m`. For example, running `sudo tune2fs -m 2 /dev/sda1` will drop it to 2% instead of 5%.
Also, if you find even 1% is too much, you can set it to something like `-m 0.8`. Or you can specify the reserve in blocks with `-r 1234` if you're feeling particular!
Thanks for the heads up! I'm transitioning to XFS since I think it's better suited for my media storage needs.
Thanks for the insight! I'm moving to XFS for more media storage, do you know if it has similar inode issues with smaller files?