Problem with free space on my hard drive

[Reshuken]

Hello guys. Well, a few days ago I noticed that the free space on my hard drive is presented differently on the Disk Usage Analyzer and when I'm exploring the drive from Nautilus; Disk Usage Analizer says I have 3.1 GB free, but Nautilus says it's only 2.6 GB.

In any case, I don't know which is correct, but I would like to see why I have this inconsistency. Thanks in advance!

[quelx]

One is probably reading the raw space available the other is calculating the clusters available

http://www.answers.com/topic/slack-space?cat=technology

[Reshuken]

Ok, that seems to be possible. A couple of question though: which one should I take for real free space available? And is there anyway to optimize this wasted space so that it can be used as normal?

[quelx]

Ok, that seems to be possible. A couple of question though: which one should I take for real free space available? And is there anyway to optimize this wasted space so that it can be used as normal?

If you format a drive you can force a particular (smaller) cluster size, the drawback is disk performance will be impacted because the accounting overhead needed to keep track of the clusters goes up. It's a trade off. You are probably better off rolling with what you have, you won't get that much space back and the price you'll pay won't be worth it.

http://www.wlug.org.nz/DiskCluster

[cdtech]

df -H from a command line