12.04 disk space?

[Len Ovens]

Here is  a puzzling one... for me anyway.

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1       1.9T   31G  1.7T   2% /
udev            494M  4.0K  494M   1% /dev
tmpfs           201M  804K  200M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            501M   92K  501M   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdd1        37G  4.4G   31G  13%
/media/1ee054d1-4d7b-41d0-982c-caa59590940e

Both sdc1 and sdd1 have the _same_ install on them. On the 40G drive the
entire install only takes 4.4G but on the 2Tb drive it takes 31G? Almost
10 times the size? Is there a file that gets sized at a percentage of the
total drive size (to a max size) or is the file system making files that
size? (large chunk size) Does this mean that on the bigger file system all
my files will be larger? Would it be better to have a smaller root
partition (10 G or so) with a second large partition for /var and /home?

Lets do a test...
create a directory in /home called test
music:/media/1ee054d1-4d7b-41d0-982c-caa59590940e# cp -a * /home/test/
That will copy the entire file system from the 40G drive into the
/home/test directory. (USB2 drives are slow...)

$ df -h
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc1       1.9T   35G  1.7T   2% /
udev            494M  4.0K  494M   1% /dev
tmpfs           201M  804K  200M   1% /run
none            5.0M     0  5.0M   0% /run/lock
none            501M   92K  501M   1% /run/shm
/dev/sdd1        37G  4.4G   31G  13%
/media/1ee054d1-4d7b-41d0-982c-caa59590940e

Well, that is reassuring anyway. It only took the same size as it was. So
not a block or chunk size issue. Either file system overhead (journal or
whatever) or as I said some variable sized file. Interesting side note and
nothing more. Setting up a root partition would not help for this. The
bigger size may actually be a good thing performance wise for all I know.




-- 
Len Ovens
www.OvenWerks.net