Hi guys.
I just installed a new hard drive. I created an ext3 partition just slightly bigger than 200gigs and mounted it as /home.
I noticed, when listing the partition size (both in Gnome or with df - command) that, even though practically nothing is present on the partition, it shows it's 197GB large, while 187GB is free. (!?) I'm wondering where these 10 gigs disapeared? Could this have something to do with the space reserved for some special processes or something? I believe, when reading tune2fs man pages that it indeed could be the case, as per default 5% of the partition size is allocated for this, which could correspond to the size reported on my partition. But it makes me thinking whether it is really necessary to have this much especially since this is a seperate /home partition, not system partition? This is actually first time I notice this. I guess I was working only with smaller partitions so I never really noticed how much it gets "eaten up" by this space reservation. Therefore, I would really appreciate if you guys could explain to me more practical sense of having this much space allocated for this "reserve" thing on a /home partition.

Any feedback is appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

Your guess is correct. 5% is reserved for root, which on / is critical(if a user or process would use up all the disk space root could not log in to fix it otherwise). You are also correct that it is not necessary on non / partitions. I would drop the reserve to 0% on the /home partitions (see tune2fs). I have done this on all my data storage drives with no ill effect (for several years).