What capacity do you get from a 1.5TB drive formatted in Ext3?

[DeanoCeltic]

Hi

I've ran out of space on my 1TB USB drives and I need to upgrade to 1.5TB. Can anyone please tell me what capacity you get from one of these if it is formatted in Ext3?

My 1TB drives give over 950GB with NTFS but only about 750GB with Ext3. Just wondering if the overhead is similar with a larger drive.

Thanks

[nuke12]

A whole thread for your reading enjoyment;

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/showth...?tid=28263

[DeanoCeltic]

Just found it!

Thanks nuke

[Gibbo]

(09-27-2009 12:15 PM)DeanoCeltic Wrote:  My 1TB drives give over 950GB with NTFS but only about 750GB with Ext3.

That really shouldn't be the case! You should get 931GB from a 1TB drive!

[DeanoCeltic]

Gibbo - here's the info I can give from memory. When I got my 1st 1TB drive, I formatted it with NTFS and filled it up. It then came time to buy a 2nd so I formatted this with Ext3 because I wanted to allow the PCH to write files to the drive.

I then attempted to copy all of the files from the full NTFS drive to the Ext3 drive and the copy stalled because the Ext3 drive was full with a good lot remaining to copy. I have a drive mapped to the Ext3 on my PC and it shows a capacity of 916GB if I right-click on it and select 'properties'. I can tell you that it holds a lot less then this (going by what the drive formatted with NTFS did).

[Gibbo]

I think this may just be down to windows... If you check out that thread of mine that nuke linked to I found that windows often reports different values to the truth... also there have been a few threads around with similar lack of copying ability.

If you hook the drive up to your PCH and hit the info button does it tell you the same? that it's only 750GB? I'd be very surprised if it did.

[DeanoCeltic]

Just tried that - the info that pops up is -

Free Space: 1GB
Total Size: 871GB

OK - 871GB is a long way from 750GB (I was going by memory!), but my main point was that the same size drive (both 1TB WD Elements) formatted in NTFS gave a lot more capacity then when it is formatted with Ext3.

I need to replace the drives (see free space above ) so I just wanted to check and see if the overhead loss was the same. I saw on another thread you posted about minimising the index section for Ext3 drives - I'll be doing that with the new drive.

[JamesGAFYS]

you need to do a sudo tunefs to a lower ratio to get your hard drive space back. by default ext2/3 format uses hard drive as temp . i reccomend setting the temp at 1% (not 10% like default) you can set it at 0% but you may run into problems when the disk gets full. you can not tunefs from windows it is a linux only command . look on google
if u need the full tunefs command line i will post it.

[Gibbo]

http://www.networkedmediatank.com/wiki/i...n_Ext3_HDD

[JamesGAFYS]

thats it Gibbo , this is what has to be done on

[DeliriumNL]

My 1.5 tb gives me 1.35 tb in ext3(2 with mapping)