[SOLVED] How to find the true amount of usable free hard drive space?

UpYours · 10-20-2019, 11:53 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by michaelk

UpYours, with what little information provided I assume you have been misled by manufactures selling drives based on the their size in GB versus GiB. It has nothing to do with filesystem overhead or reserved space.

1000.2 GB ~= 931.51 GiB.

i'd call you delusional but we both know you're just flat out lying. it has nothing to do with manufacture claims and you know it. when you install a drive the the size you see before formatting is what you get. from their the file system does take a percentage of it for itself. try again.

michaelk · 10-20-2019, 01:30 PM

Here is a real example of one of my systems.

Output of fdisk

Code:

Disk /dev/sda: 160.0 GB, 160041885696 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 19457 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

output of lsblk

Code:

NAME    MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE  MOUNTPOINT
sda       8:0    0 149.1G  0 disk  
├─sda1    8:1    0   500M  0 part  /boot
├─sda2    8:2    0   7.8G  0 part  [SWAP]
└─sda3    8:3    0 140.8G  0 part  /

output of df -h

Code:

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1       477M  192M  260M  43% /boot

I don't have a disk with a single partition but this should illustrate my point. The manufactures size is 160 GB i.e base 10 as shown in the output of fdisk. However, the output of the lsblk and my screen shot of gparted shows 149.1 GiB. If you look at your screen shot in the upper right hand corner the size of the drive is posted i.e. /dev/sdb (931.51 GiB). This is the size of the entire drive not partition or filesystem. It just so happens that you have a single partition that uses its entire space.

Quote:

when you install a drive the the size you see before formatting is what you get. from their the file system does take a percentage of it for itself. try again.

Yes, a filesystem has overhead as metadata. You posted your screen shot but did not provide and explanation as to what you thought the numbers meant so I was guessing. A partition is a container nothing more and typically a filesystem uses the entire space of the partition.
Partition size = filesystem overhead + used space + unused space (as far as I know)

https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/11/0...data-overhead/

I really do not want to keep hijacking the thread and do not want to get in trouble by astrogeek. Any further discussion on this topic would need to be in another thread.

rtmistler · 10-20-2019, 01:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by grumpyskeptic

Using df -h on my 500G HD gives:

$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
udev 1.5G 4.0K 1.5G 1% /dev
tmpfs 301M 1.3M 299M 1% /run
/dev/sda1 456G 428G 5.0G 99% /
none 4.0K 0 4.0K 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
none 5.0M 0 5.0M 0% /run/lock
none 1.5G 41M 1.5G 3% /run/shm
none 100M 24K 100M 1% /run/user

I would guess that the relevant line is:

/dev/sda1 456G 428G 5.0G 99% /

Thanks.

p.s. I am surprised that the trolling and/or rude posts in this thread have not been deleted yet, and I don't recall seeing things like that in the past.

Given this reply, I'll consider the topic solved and will mark the thread as such.

The only type of posts which get deleted are those which are spam, or about piracy.

That said, user UpYours will no longer be joining any further LQ discussions.

I share my disappointment with the continued off topic and personal attacks by various members in this thread.