I've been seeing this with every single ext4 or ext3 disk/partition I work with, but I decided to make a post about it now since I got a bigger hard drive.

I formatted a 1TB external HDD as ext4 last night.

This is what I got:

http://img146.imageshack.us/img146/2259/71163295.png

http://img69.imageshack.us/img69/7180/70755142.png

The first imaage is from GParted, and the second one from Nautilus, when you right click the disk and click on Properties. Notice how GParted says the disk is 931 GiB while the Properties window says it's 917 GB. This happens to every single ext4 or ext3 drive I've worked with, and every other Linux computer with ext4 or ext3 I've seen. I know about the 5% reserved space in ext4, but it's not that. The 5% would be that 45.8 GB you see as used (the disk in actually empty) in the Properties image.

Now, I know about how HDD manufacturers will tell you it's 1000TB when in reality it's not, etc. The thing is, according to this converter: http://wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html

1000 GB would be 931 GiB. So far so good! The GParted image shows the disk as 931 GiB. The thing is, as you can see, it also shows 14.81 GiB used right out of the gate, which leaves that 917 GiB that the Properties image takes as the "total capacity".

So what's going on here? Is it just that ext4 takes that much off the actual disk capacity? Because I compared with a friends 1TB external, and it showed its total capacity as 931 in both GParted AND the disk properties, but of course his disk was NTFS.

It'd be weird if ext4 takes off 14 GiB while NTFS takes nothing, so I'm wondering what exactly is that and if it can be changed/fixed somehow?

Like I said, this applies to every single ext4 and ext3 drive I've worked with.

The reduction is probably due to journaling.

If you really want to, you could turn it off.

http://kernelnewbies.org/Ext4#head-b...f00764cb9beb1e

My cynical view would be that FOSS will tell you it has used some (for journal or whatever) while M$oft don't.
Maybe it's just my years in the business showing through ...

Is the journaling something that's safe to disable in external drives, or should I keep it? What could the consequences of keeping it be?

I dunno, I'd tend to agree but even when you format a 1 TB drive as NTFS in Linux, you see the size as 931 instead of 917, so I don't think it's that.

syg00 is referring to the 14GB extra that you have 'lost', not to the 931GB

It's the same

The drive is shown as 917GB if it's ext4, but it's shown as 931GB if it's NTFS (both in Linux). That 14GB is what's lost because of the journaling I'm guessing.

I don't know if it's worth disabling though. If it gave a big performance boost maybe. But I don't know the downsides yet.

By default drives reserve 5% of the drive for root to write to. You can reduce that by using tune2fs -m # /dev/sdxx .