Does EXT3 reserve space on a drive?

sWiZzLe · 28 Jun 2009 at 00:35

I posted this in Hard Drives but have had no replies, so i thought i may have more luck here ...

Bought my first NAS recently, I know nothing about Linux and am a little confused about how EXT3 works.

Just using a basic drive setup at the moment as i couldn't afford to buy 4 new drives and needed to get 4x1tb drives out of my pc.

1st drive i formatted ext3 which created 3 partitions (100mb, 930gb and 500mb). I was only able to copy about 880gb to the drive leaving 50gb i couldnt use
2nd drive i also formatted to ext3 but when i put it in my pc to transfer data to it, there was only 1 partition and it was formatted as ext2.

I dont know what the first partition of on the first drive is, 2nd partition is obvious and 3rd is the swap drive. Is the missing 50gb reserved for something, and is that why the 2nd drive is setup up the way it is?
Is the 50gb reserved for recovery for all drives should a problem occur?

Cheers

vidda · 28 Jun 2009 at 00:38

5% is reserved, it's mainly so the system can function if you fill the drive up with stuff.

Look at this thread: http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18025378

theheyes · 28 Jun 2009 at 12:32

Post the make and model of the NAS, the answers might be buried in the manual somewhere.

BigglesPiP · 28 Jun 2009 at 22:34

Yes, in 2 ways.

1. Linux and other systems often reserve 5% for privileged programs.
2. The ext filesystem reserves an amount for file meta data.

If you have few large files, then you need less of the second kind of space, if you have lots of small files (the default) then you need more of this space.

sWiZzLe · 29 Jun 2009 at 18:48

Its an MRT 35HD-QUAD-NAS, i don't think there is a manual for it. I posted on their forums but not much activity there

Disk Name: /dev/hda
Capacity: 938,296MB
Used: 887,955MB
Free: 50,341MB
Disk Usage: 94%

Disk Name: /dev/hdb
Capacity: 938,898MB
Used: 886,193MB
Free: 52,704MB
Disk Usage: 94%

Both drives full

I had read something about this tunefs thing, but im guessing i need to have a linux os installed to use it as i cannot find anywhere to download it?

sWiZzLe · 1 Jul 2009 at 16:49

So i have tune2fs now, but i have no idea how i am supposed to install / copy it to my nas. I've found the folder its to be in, in telnet.

Any ideas?