format external USB Drive

I have a 110GB external USB drive.
I have erased everthing from it and then used the partition tool in yast to format it to ext4.

this is the setting used.

filesystem > ext4
stride length > none
block size > auto
bytes per inode > auto
percentage of blocks reserved for root > auto
disable regular checks
inode size > default
directory index feature > checked

After a complete format I can see that the is only 105GB available and there ar 5.8GB showing as used.
What is using that 5GB? I can’t see anything on the drive - not even any hidden files.

Is it being set aside for something? Seems like a large amount.

OK - reformatted again and changed the option

percentage of blocks reserved for root > auto

to

percentage of blocks reserved for root > 0

Now the disk is only showing 187MB in use.

Am I going to run into any trouble having changed this option?

On 2009-11-26, farcusnz <farcusnz@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> OK - reformatted again and changed the option
>
> percentage of blocks reserved for root > auto
>
> to
>
> percentage of blocks reserved for root > 0
>
> Now the disk is only showing 187MB in use.
>
> Am I going to run into any trouble having changed this option?

No problem at al. I was going to suggest freeing tha reserved space with
tune2fs.

Here’s someting I put in my notes, a while ago:
------------ Quote ------------
*** Space ‘wasted’ on ext2/ext3 partitions:
When an ext2/3 filesystem is formated by default 5% is reserved for
root. Reserved space is supposed to reduce fragementation and allow
root to login in case the filesystem becomes 100% used. You can use
tune2fs to reduce the amount of reserved space.
----------- UnQuote -----------

It makes (some) sense to have such an choice on the / partition, or in var.
But not on a data disk.

I had the seem problem on my 500 GB /home. That was 25 GB wasted!

Try: man tune2fs


Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.

How about the “directory index feature”

What is the point of that?
Should I have that checked or can that also be disabled?

On 2009-11-27, farcusnz <farcusnz@no-mx.forums.opensuse.org> wrote:
>
> How about the “directory index feature”
>
> What is the point of that?
> Should I have that checked or can that also be disabled?

Keep it on. It used to be off in my old SuSE 10.0 setup.
Switching it on accelerated the directory accesses by a crazy factor!

One of my script sorts incomming file into subdirs. From time to time, I
regroup them all to one dir, to start the distribution over again (when
there was a serious change in my script).
Anyway: collecting 200.000 file from subdirs into 1 dir used to take 20 min,
but with dir_index, it does the same in 11 secs!


Any time things appear to be going better, you have overlooked
something.

have you tried using kde partition manager or gparted, I have no trouble with external devices and either of these tools.