reserved-blocks-percentage: is 5% too big for 40gb partition?
 

Hello

I'm making an ext3 filesystem on a 40gb and 50gb partition.

Is the default 5% too much for the reserved space? These partitions will only host user data on them.

If I can make them smaller, what % do you recommend? About 1%?

hamish

Hey

Ok, my research indicates that 1% (or if you want 0%) on each partition is enough if you have a 40GB partition. The only ones which REALLY need to have space at all are those where root (or root owned programs) will write to:
/
/root (if in different partition to /)
/usr
/var

The reason that this is reserved is so that, if these partitions run out of a space, there is still 5% available for root to write to temporarily so that he can delete/move files to free up space .

From the point of view of folders which are just holding user data (like /home) then you can safely reduce this to 1% or 0%.

Hope this helps the next person.

Hamish