Good morning ALUGers.

I have noticed something a little odd about the space allocation on my disks. Prompted by the disks getting rather full.

Taking two in particular I see (using system monitor) device type total free available used /dev/sdb1 ext3 1386.0Gb 79.8Gb 10.0Gb 1306.2Gb 99% /dev/sdc1 ext3 1386.3Gb 111.0Gb 41.2Gb 1275.2Gb 96%

Ok. total = free + used but why only 10Gb / 41.2Gb available?

I find it hard to believe that there is 69.8Gb of disk lost by sector padding at the end of files or is allocated to the directory. Even more odd that both disks appear to have "lost" 69.8Gb.

I get the same numbers (to 1Kb precision) if I use du and df to check the space.

I don't know the ext3/4 file system layout and would like to know if these numbers are normal or exceptional. Could I have done something at mkfs time to "improve" on the above?

BTW, Trash is empty.

I'm not overly worried by this, it's just a "want to know" thing. The disk almost full problem will go away on the 3rd July when the automatic backup program deletes all the incremental backup data for June from these disks, which are my first line of system backups. I've had a very heavy month processing VHS tapes to mpeg4(xvid).avi files.