Re: Maximize disk format space

From: Kevin D. Snodgrass (nobody_at_spamcop.net)
Date: 04/23/04 

Date: Thu, 22 Apr 2004 17:16:50 -0500

Hactar wrote:
> In article <c68pnl$ais$1@nntp6.u.washington.edu>,
> Bob Cent <centN_O_S_P_A_M@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>>I have a 160gb ATA hard drive that formats to different usuable space
>>depending how I format it:
>>
>> 149gb Windows NTFS
>> 139gb Linux EXT2 (mkfs)
>> 126gb Linux EXT3 (mke2fs)
>>
>>Is there a way that I can approach the same capacity in Linux that I can get
>>in Windows?
>
>
> It looks like you're comparing free space in the filesystem, for various
> filesystems.
>
> 1. The difference between EXT3 and NTFS is ~15%, going purely by the numbers.
> 2. Some of those figures might be decimal gigabytes (10^9 B, 1,000,000,000
> B) and some might be binary gigabytes (2^30 B, 1,073,741,824 B). Compare
> the raw byte count if you can.
> 3. You can adjust the allocation block size, the journal size, the amount of
> space reserved for root; all should have effects on how much data you can
> actually store on the volume if not "free space". I'd vote for the
> "amount reserved for root" as more than accounting for the ~7% difference
> between EXT2 and NTFS.
> 4. SI is case-sensitive -- "="gram", "G"="giga-"; "b"="bit", "B"="byte".
>

Just curious, for anyone that *knows* the answer here. Does
Windows report its disk size as GB or GiB? That is, does it
report billions of bytes or true gigabytes? 149GiB
(1024*1024*1024*149) is almost 160 billion bytes, which is
how hard drive manufacturers are now reporting capacity and
is about exactly the manufacturers stated capacity of this
drive. If NTFS does report GiB, then it is including all
space on this drive. If NTFS reports GB, but *nix reports
GiB, that will explain (at least part of) the discrepancy.

Second, does NTFS set aside space for its equivalent to *nix
inodes? Or does NTFS use dynamic allocation? Since ext2/3
preallocate inodes it will report the true usable space.

I'm severely (and happily!) Winders challenged...

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