Ext4 vs NTFS free space

LybsterKodi · August 8, 2024 at 7:15 AM

I have a 6TB Seagate formatted to Ext4 connected to my LibreElec machine (Dell Optiplex i5) and a second one formatted to NTFS connected to my Windows laptop and used as a backup. As far as I can tell there are exactly the same files on both (I sync then regularly) but the Ext4 has c400GB less free space than the NTFS one.

Is this normal for an Ext4 drive? If not are there any tools to investigate the difference?

**HiassofT** · August 8, 2024 at 9:08 AM

How did you format the ext4 drive? By default mkfs.ext4 will reserve 5% of the space for the root user (that can be adjusted with the -m option) - which about matches your observation.

You can check the current setting with eg tune2fs -l /dev/sda1 (look for "Reserved block count" and "Block count") and if needed set it to 0% with eg tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1

(replace /dev/sda1 with the correct device node of your drive as shown eg in mount output)

so long,

Hias

LybsterKodi · August 8, 2024 at 12:15 PM

That looks like it

Block count: 1465130240
Reserved block count: 73256512

Yet another thing I didn't know about unix