Disk Usage Analyzer wrong?

**Tsula** · April 17th, 2009

I have Ubuntu 8.10, new install. My hard drive is 250 GB. When I look at the Disk Usage Analyzer it's showing 223 GB total filesystem availablity, almost 3 GB used. Sooo... Where is the 25 odd GB.. Confusing me! Halp. xD

**Barry Carroll** · April 17th, 2009

No it is not wrong. Your hard drive is 250GB and hard-drives are usually sold in terms of GB or TB which is based on 1000s, so 1GB = 1000MB and 1MB = 1000kB and so on.

Ubuntu and other operating systems use GiB and TiB, in other words they count in 1024s, so 1GiB = 1024MiB and so on. It's a classic example of hardware vendors misleading consumers in my opinion but it's been done for so long that it seems to be a standard now!

Have a look here for a calculator
http://wintelguy.com/gb2gib.html

and here for some more info.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GiB

250GB works out to 232GiB

**Tsula** · April 18th, 2009

Awesome, thanks :3

**eric9477** · April 18th, 2009

I have a laptop running Ubuntu 8.04 with a 10GB hdd (at least that's what was advertised when I bought it back in 2001). According to the converter posted above, 10GB = 9.31 GiB, but the Disk Usage Analyzer swears that I have a 17.7GB hard drive. Is the analyzer wrong?

**unutbu** · April 18th, 2009

Do you have Samba running? Disk Usage Analyzer includes space available in remote Samba directories in its total.

**eric9477** · April 18th, 2009

No, but I have noticed something funny in the preferences of analyzer. The list of devices to include in the scan has two entries: /dev/sda1 and gvfs-fuse-daemon. Both have a total capacity of 8.8GB. The gvfs-fuse-daemon is mounted in the home directory of sda1 so I'm thinking it's just scanning the sda1 twice somehow right? At any rate I unchecked it and the numbers in analyzer make more sense now.

**caue.rego** · May 11th, 2009

Well, as you can see on my self-explained-screenshot, for me it is wrong. Just like for this lone guy:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1963145

I think this issue might be on not scanning hidden stuff, but I just don't know or care. I just deleted it anyway.

**Wiebelhaus** · June 5th, 2009

Originally Posted by caue.rego

Well, as you can see on my self-explained-screenshot, for me it is wrong. Just like for this lone guy:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=1963145

I think this issue might be on not scanning hidden stuff, but I just don't know or care. I just deleted it anyway.

I'm getting wrong output if I'm reading a mounted HDD but if it's local then it reads correctly.

I have to fix this and when I do , I'll update it here.

**caue.rego** · October 16th, 2009

my DUA always read wrong comparing to DU and actually disk usage. it doesn't matter which partition or mounted disk (although I don't have any external disk to mount other than pen drives).

I just chose that vista partition on my local disk because it wouldn't present any permission errors. you can see on that picture I run DU on it without SU and still get different results for several directories.

that problem persists up to today.