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I have a few 16tb disks that were NTFS, and I have recently reformatted to ext4. The size of the disks shows at as 15.1tb if I format in ext4, but if I reformat into ntfs, I get the full 16tb. All of these disks were full before the format, so I'd like to get that terabyte back if possible. How would I go about this?

Manji24
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    Possibly the difference is that ext4 by default reserves 5% for root - see for example [ext4 partition size / free space discrepancies](https://askubuntu.com/questions/48488/ext4-partition-size-free-space-discrepancies) – steeldriver Aug 30 '22 at 20:07
  • what do you mean with 15.1 tb? available space? or the size of the partition? if the 1st it is not the 5% reserved spae. ... – Rinzwind Aug 30 '22 at 21:05
  • 15.1 as the partition space and there are no other partitions on it and it says 0% full. – Manji24 Aug 30 '22 at 21:08

1 Answers1

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That 5% resevered space steeldriver mentions is for system disks, not partitions you do not boot from.

In case it is this 5%:

The current reserved space is shown with (change sda(1) if need another device)

tune2fs -l /dev/sda

This will set it to 0 for /dev/sda1

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sda1

Another approach:

If you want more data per Gb btrfs mounted with compress=zstd will use significantly less disk space than ext. It might still be 15.1Tb but since all files that can be compressed are compressed you will get a lot more out of that 15.1Tb. btrfs does require periodic maintenance though.

Rinzwind
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