I have a few 16tb disks that were NTFS, and I have recently reformatted to ext4. The size of the disks shows at as 15.1tb if I format in ext4, but if I reformat into ntfs, I get the full 16tb. All of these disks were full before the format, so I'd like to get that terabyte back if possible. How would I go about this?
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1Possibly the difference is that ext4 by default reserves 5% for root - see for example ext4 partition size / free space discrepancies – steeldriver Aug 30 '22 at 20:07
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what do you mean with 15.1 tb? available space? or the size of the partition? if the 1st it is not the 5% reserved spae. ... – Rinzwind Aug 30 '22 at 21:05
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15.1 as the partition space and there are no other partitions on it and it says 0% full. – Manji24 Aug 30 '22 at 21:08
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That 5% resevered space steeldriver mentions is for system disks, not partitions you do not boot from.
In case it is this 5%:
The current reserved space is shown with (change sda(1) if need another device)
tune2fs -l /dev/sda
This will set it to 0 for /dev/sda1
tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1
Another approach:
If you want more data per Gb btrfs mounted with compress=zstd will use significantly less disk space than ext. It might still be 15.1Tb but since all files that can be compressed are compressed you will get a lot more out of that 15.1Tb. btrfs does require periodic maintenance though.
Rinzwind
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