Trouble formatting blank hard drive

[montag dp]

Hi Peltsi,

I registered and added my name to the list of those affected.

[ricardisimo]

I'm piggybacking on this thread, maybe for good reasons, maybe not.

I'm formatting external (USB) 500GB hard drives with gparted, creating two partions on each: an EXT3 and an NTFS, each comprising half of the drive. Simple question for everyone:

Why is there IMMEDIATELY 12.7GB used on the EXT3? It makes no sense. There's nothing on the drive to journal or index. almost 13Gigs??? For less than 250 GBs total? WTF? All of the NTFS drive is available for storage, by the way, as it should be.

What gives?

[oldfred]

Some tools report GB others GiB. Journal is created as soon as you format drive. And Linux reserves 5% which you can adjust. That is to prevent system from crashing when you get low on space. Windows assumes you know when you get below abotu 10% and it gets really slow it is time to houseclean or get more space.

MB vs MiB
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binary_prefix
http://www.osforge.com/news/001337.html
Then when you format it, the ext4 is journalized so it reserves space for the journal. This improves performance and allows error correction for the cost of a small amount of space. Also reserves space.
http://blog.flexion.org/index.php/20...ed-space-ext4/
Hard Drive size
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gigabyt...umer_confusion
More confusion?
http://www.neowin.net/news/ubuntu-im...future-release
1 Gigabyte (GB) = 1,000,000,000 bytes.
1 Gibibyte (GiB) = 1024x1024x1024 = 1,073,741,824 bytes
160 GB (gigabytes) = 149.01 GiB (gibibytes)



Also in Linux the default is to reserve 5% of the diskspace for the superuser (this can be adjusted using tune2fs -m).
sudo tune2fs -l /dev/sdd3