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I have posted a very similar question here before.

A similar thing happened this morning. I received a Low Disk Space warning

The volume "InternalHDD" has only 873.8 MB disk space remaining

I clicked the button "Examine...", and up comes Disk Usage Analyzer which (unfortunately) says

Could not scan folder "/mnt/InternalHDD" or some of the folders it contains

So I start the Disks utility to have a look, and the Disks utility reports that my disk "InternalHDD" has 52 GB free.

There's no immediate problem, because I was able to free up 256GB immediately on my "InternalHDD".

What I want to know is:

  • Why does this happen?
  • What is being measured to give the 873.8 MB free disk space number?
  • What is being measured to give the 52 GB free disk space number?
  • Why are these numbers different, when they are supposedly for the exact same disk at the same moment?

Here are screenshots of each of these:

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el_gallo_azul
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  • If it's not a duplicate, write a comment @Fabby... – Fabby Dec 07 '14 at 20:25
  • I just had a look at What is taking up so much space on my disk, beside the filesystem? and it is different to my post. That post is described well by the post title, but my post is because I don't know how much space is left on my disk, because I am given two completely different numbers. – el_gallo_azul Dec 07 '14 at 22:32
  • 5% of storage is reserved for root as I recall. This may be the source of the discrepancy you are seeing. – Elder Geek Dec 18 '14 at 16:48
  • OK thanks. That made sense at first, but then I realised that what you say would (as far as I can tell) only affect the disk containing root, which in my case is an SSD, whereas my "InternalHDD" is a second drive within the same case which I use for things requiring zillions of write cycles. – el_gallo_azul Dec 19 '14 at 03:43
  • The 5% reserve does not only affect the root. – psusi Dec 22 '14 at 21:50
  • Anything about the system, or root, is not relevant because this is not the system disk. It's effectively like an external USB disk, but with internal SATA (and I've got it to mount at startup). – el_gallo_azul Dec 23 '14 at 06:52
  • All Linux file systems (for permanent storage) reserve some portion of their space for super-users no matter their mount point (which is unknown during file system creation anyway). You can change that with an option to mkfs. For ext file systems it's -m [PERCENTAGE]. Most of these file systems allow you to change that amount later on, e. g. tune2fs -m [PERCENTAGE] for ext. – David Foerster Mar 04 '15 at 09:39

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