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I wanted to reinstall Ubuntu and formatted all my disks but the installer got stuck when creating the primary partition on my ssd. I decided to create the partition manualy with gparted but whilst the installation of Ubuntu the installer said there were 4GB used on my ssd but it was formated and should be empty. The Disks program says there is a 250GB big partition on my ssd. But when I look at the properties in Nautilus it says there is only 246GB space.

What does it mean?

Volker Siegel
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Marton
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  • look at this: http://askubuntu.com/questions/131516/new-ext4-partition-and-used-space – RiddleMeThis Jun 29 '15 at 09:48
  • @MiHa Thank you but I think I haven't had problems like this before but maybe it's just an imagination . – Marton Jun 29 '15 at 09:58
  • It's the same on my machine, when I've formatted my SSD as EXT4, there was some space already used... it's perfectly normal – RiddleMeThis Jun 29 '15 at 09:59
  • Also NTFS has this behaviour, it takes less space after formatting, but still, there is some space used. For reference about NTFS: http://superuser.com/questions/424622/newly-formatted-ntfs-external-hard-drive-already-has-used-space-what-determ – RiddleMeThis Jun 29 '15 at 10:02
  • Yes, this is normal – Tim Jun 29 '15 at 10:34

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This is normal, formatting will always use up some space. For example, my 2TB HDD is recognised as 1.819 TB.

This is for a couple of reasons, the first being the manufacuturer lies about the volume (they will say 1 TB is 1000 MB, not 1024, and so on down).

This means my 2 TB HDD is actually 2,000,398,934,016 bytes. This translates to 2,000,398,934,016 / 10243 ~ 1863 GB, or 1.819 TB.

Note that I've just lost 9% of my disk space, which is close to 200 GB, just because they lie about the space.

And then formatting takes up space. I'm not sure how much, but GParted claims my Disk is 1822 GB (more than my calculations) but there is definitely some loss there.

Aparently,

ext3 and ext4 file systems take 5% of partition size for security etc.

Tim
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