questions about newly mounted HD at mountpount /backup

English Install/Boot/Login
1

I did the following:

  • in virtual box I made a new HD
  • Booted Suse 11.1
  • went to console (ctrl+alt+F1)
  • sfdisk -l
  • identified the newly added HD, because it’s unused
  • fdisk /etc/sdc1 (with one partition)
  • mkfs.ext3 /etc/sdc1 (Made it ext3 filesystem)
  • mkdir /backup
  • echo “/dev/sdc1 /backup ext3 defaults 0 2” >> /etc/fstab
  • Above command wrote the info into /etc/fstab to automount the latest HD on every single boot
  • df -h
  • It shows that mine sdc1 is 3% filled. But if

I try to look. I do not see any files. Only one directory named lost+found.

Questions:

  1. How can this be? Because 3% of 512MB is
    quit a lot.
  2. Can I just remove this mount again without problems. Not that Linux is using it for the linux OS itself?
2

Just the files system can take up 3%.

3

Ahh, So If I plan to mount extra HD space, I need to take into account that linux/unix Filesystems will use up to 3% of my total HD space?

Is that right?

Thanks for answering!

4

Any file system takes up space. About 3% is a rough estimate.

Also it depends on what you store. If you have one huge file there is little wasted space but if you have tons of small files there can be significant wasted space. Each file takes a minimum of 1 block of space. The block size is dependent on the hardware but it typically 512/1024 though it can be more. So if 512 and you have 1000 one byte files they will actually take up 512,000 bytes not 1000 bytes.