Harddrive size being reported incorrectly?

[Olivier Gautherot]

On Thursday 29 December 2005 18:34, Jerry McAllister wrote:
> > > [...]
> > > When you slice and partition the drive, there will likely be a handful
> > > of sectors that don't round out to an even value so those are dropped.
> > > Then, when you do the newfs, some space is taken by the spare superblocks
> > > and finally the system reserves 8%.     So, I would say you are getting
> > > it all.
> > 
> > 289GB is before the 8% reservation. I actually turned that off with tunefs.
> 
> I strongly suggest you do not do that - at least completely off.
> Reduce it some, if you like, but keep some.

I too strongly recommend you keep these 8% in.

The fact is that the space is not wasted: in the old days, it was meant
to prevent the system from happily creating files until it dies - beyond
100%, files already opened could be written to but you could not create
new files. Some kind of "soft landing". I suppose it is still the case.

Actually, a friend asked me a few weeks ago how the file system could
reach 110% and he was speculating on how the system could use the
swap partition to get to this level: it was not the swap partition but this
extra space artificially held up.

You can safely and without afterthoughts let this 8% in.

Cheers
-- 
Olivier Gautherot
olivier at gautherot.net