I'm not sure if this is a bug, or if this should be posted in a different sub-forum. Why does it show used space as 4.02 GB on an empty drive? I noticed it shows something similar for reiserfs drives, except on those it says 33.6 MB. I understand that a drives actual sizes vs what is usable, especially after formatting is different, but if this is what is happening, why even show that in the GUI? From an end users perspective, I'm expecting it to say 0 for used space on an empty drive.

 

 

Regards,

Adrian

It's normal, it's different for each file system and it also varies with the device size.

6 minutes ago, johnnie.black said:

It's normal, it's different for each file system and it also varies with the device size.

Could you provide some more details on it? Is there any reasoning behind it? Why wouldn't an end user see it as 0 on an "empty" drive?

 

The reason I noticed this and it was bothering me was because I'm in the process of moving all my drives to XFS and in the process I'm moving everything from a reiserfs drive to an XFS drive. Of course, once I'm done moving everything, going here and seeing > 0 used made me second guess whether I forgot to move something or not.

Edited November 14, 20178 yr by Adrian

It's the normal filesystem overhead.

2 hours ago, Adrian said:

Could you provide some more details on it?

 

XFS uses around 1GB for the file system itself per 1TB disk size, e.g. an empty 2TB disk has 2GB used, while a 4TB disk has 4GB used as part of the file system.

1 hour ago, bonienl said:

 

XFS uses around 1GB for the file system itself per 1TB disk size, e.g. an empty 2TB disk has 2GB used, while a 4TB disk has 4GB used as part of the file system.

Yes, as I mentioned, I understand the actual available space will be different based on the file system. I mentioned that I've been using that screen to see how much is used/free. Sure, you could say I shouldn't be using that screen as it shows stats based on the raw disk so it will include the file system requirements with the free space. I'm aware of it now, so it won't be an issue with the exception of always taking into consideration how much the file system uses per GB in this case.

 

Is there a better view of all the drives where it doesn't take into account what the file system uses? Where it would show me the used space based from within the file system? So an empty drive, regardless of what file system it uses would show 0 if it's "empty"? Is there a setting for this?

It is very easy to see whether a disk is empty or not. Just click on the 'folder' button of the disk to view it.

 

2 minutes ago, bonienl said:

It is very easy to see whether a disk is empty or not. Just click on the 'folder' button of the disk to view it.

 

Yes, that's obvious. I'm talking about a single place, showing all the drives and only the stats of the contents, not including what the file system uses.

3 minutes ago, Adrian said:

Yes, that's obvious. I'm talking about a single place, showing all the drives and only the stats of the contents, not including what the file system uses.

What you are asking won't work. If you define empty as zero bytes, it doesn't mean there is no content on the disk, it can still have folders defined including files of zero bytes size.