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We have an Ubuntu backup server with removeable hard drives in caddys.

They are standard IDE/PATA, it came to light that although the drives in the caddys are 160GB in size they where only partitioned as 130GB (df showing 125.99GB).

I think previous hard drives used where possibly a mix of 120 and 130gb - which where phased out due to failures and the larger drives where just copies of the old.

After wiping and re-partitioning (using GParted) the partition shows as 146.71GB. Our backups complete and df now reads only 91% used, instead of the previous 100%!

I was expecting more gain from repartitioning than this, would EXT2 or 4 give us more available space?

Within windows i'm sure 160GB drives used to partition as 156GB?

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Although it displays as "146.71GB", it actually means 146.71 Gib. For historical reasons, Linux displays disk space in GiB but uses the suffix "GB". 146.71GiB is equal to about 157GB. So you are seeing the same behavior you saw in Windows.

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  • GB is Gigabyte, Gib is Gibibyte. I understand how 1 KB is 1,000 bytes to hard drive manufacturors, yet 1,024 bytes to most windows operating systems. Am i right in thinking i should be calling that a kibibyte?
    – HaydnWVN
    Feb 8, 2012 at 9:57
  • Yes, that's correct. We're stuck with the confusing use of the same term for two different purposes.
    – David Schwartz
    Feb 8, 2012 at 10:01
  • Thanks David, knew that was the issue but wasn't aware of Linux displaying in GiB :)
    – HaydnWVN
    Feb 8, 2012 at 10:39

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