Lossing HDD Space?

3rdKey · 08-08-2007, 08:33 PM

Hey everyone,

So I just bought this Seagate Free Agent 500GB external HDD to store all of my stuff on and it came pre-formatted as NTFS. So I went into GParted (I am using Fedora 7, kernel 2.6.22.1) and re-formatted the drive as ext3. However, now the drive, which is completely empty, shows that it only has 463.8GB of free space. How did I loose 36.2 GIGS? That seems odd to me.

tajamari · 08-08-2007, 08:37 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by 3rdKey

Hey everyone,

So I just bought this Seagate Free Agent 500GB external HDD to store all of my stuff on and it came pre-formatted as NTFS. So I went into GParted (I am using Fedora 7, kernel 2.6.22.1) and re-formatted the drive as ext3. However, now the drive, which is completely empty, shows that it only has 463.8GB of free space. How did I loose 36.2 GIGS? That seems odd to me.

try formatting it as fat32, then mount it as ext3 when u connect it your linux box. 500GB will be shown. it also happened to me on my 200GB external HDD.

michaelk · 08-08-2007, 09:03 PM

By default when you create an ext2/3 filesystem 5% is reserved for root's use. This is to allow root to login in case the filesystem becomes full and to reduce fragmentation. You can change the amount of reserved space by using the tune2fs command.

Without knowing the true size of the harddrive I suspect the difference between the 5% and 500GB is the typical manufactures specification of stating size using 1000 vs 1024 bytes.

jay73 · 08-08-2007, 10:36 PM

That's completely normal, 3rdKey. MY "500" GB drives are only 465GB and my "250" GB drives only 232.5. As michaelk has pointed out, all of this is a consequence of hard drive manufacturers using their own standards:
1kb = 1000b
1mb=1000kb
1gb=1000mb
Add it all up and you lose 7% from what you would get if they had used 1024 instead.