This is my first time posting, so be gentle...

I wanted to know what is the minimum size for the reserve space on an ext3 partition ?

We have a 40GB drive, partitioned as a 50MB boot partition, 512MB swap partition, and the remainder as the root partition formatted as an ext3 filesystem.

We want to maximize the content we can store on the root partition, and a developer has suggested eliminating the 5% reserve space to 0.

I don't believe we should reduce this to zero, but I can't find any documentation that indicates why we shouldn't do this.

I believe we can shrink the size from approximately 2GB, but was wondering what is the minimum I should use ?

Is there any documentation I can use to defend my thoughts on why eliminating the reserve space is a bad idea ?

Thanks,
Paul

You need to reserve some for root access in case the filesystem gets full, so root can delete old files and such. It is that simple. You can reduce the size to say 1% but never go to zero.

For the details see: http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Partition/formatting.html

Question: RHL7.2 is very old and not supported, why are you still using it??? Please consider getting a modern support OS, if staying with the Red Hat family check out CentOS or Scientific Linux (at least version 3.X of either).

http://www.centos.org/
https://www.scientificlinux.org/

.

Welcome to LinuxQuestions.

By default when an ext2/3 filesystem is created 5% is reserved for root. This is supposed to reduce fragmentation as well as allow root to login if the filesystem becomes full. Since this is your / partition I would not suggest reducing reserved space to zero. And yes I have done this more then once.

I have not seen any absolute numbers but it can be easily changed using the tune2fs command. The min amount is 1%

Leonard,
Thanks for the URL.
As for the use of the antiquated OS, we are using CentOS on more recent projects. Unfortunately on this project, we have little / no influence on the OS.

Thanks,
Paul