Recently I bought a portable harddrive from Western Digital. The Western Digital Elements (WDE1U10000E) carries 1 Terabyte of space and can be connected via USB 2.0. 1TB, for just 99,00 Euro (2008-12-27). According to Wikipedia and the SI standard the drive must contain 1,000,000,000,000 bytes (1TB). fdisk shows us:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes

So that is correct.

The disk is preformatted FAT32. After mounting the disk, df shows me there is actually 976283280 KiB (932GiB) available. This is about 999714078720 bytes. It looks like 490807296 bytes (468MiB) is gone, but it must be used for File Allocation Tables.

Because FAT32 is crappy old and I use Linux and want a journaling filesystem, I will reformat the device with ext3. After setting the right partition table type via fdisk.

$ mkfs.ext3 -m0 /dev/sda1
mke2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Filesystem label=
OS type: Linux
Block size=4096 (log=2)
Fragment size=4096 (log=2)
61054976 inodes, 244190000 blocks
0 blocks (0.00%) reserved for the super user
First data block=0
Maximum filesystem blocks=0
7453 block groups
32768 blocks per group, 32768 fragments per group
8192 inodes per group
Superblock backups stored on blocks:
        32768, 98304, 163840, 229376, 294912, 819200, 884736, 1605632, 2654208,
        4096000, 7962624, 11239424, 20480000, 23887872, 71663616, 78675968,
        102400000, 214990848

Writing inode tables: done
Creating journal (32768 blocks): done
Writing superblocks and filesystem accounting information: done

This filesystem will be automatically checked every 36 mounts or
180 days, whichever comes first.  Use tune2fs -c or -i to override.

After a minute or 10 (yeah! USB 2.0) it was all done. First of all 2646016 bytes (2584 KiB) is not formatted (1000204886016 – (244190000 * 4096)). After mounting the disk, df shows me this time there is 961432072 KiB (917 GiB) available. This is less then FAT32, but we have a journaling filesystem now. 15327928 (97676000 – 961432072) KiB is used for that. But why and how?

dumpe2fs /dev/sda1 shows us:

dumpe2fs 1.41.3 (12-Oct-2008)
Filesystem volume name:   <none>
Last mounted on:          <not available>
Filesystem UUID:          0bdd2888-06fc-4b22-a6e5-987ac65236ee
Filesystem magic number:  0xEF53
Filesystem revision #:    1 (dynamic)
Filesystem features:      has_journal ext_attr resize_inode dir_index filetype needs_recovery sparse_super large_file
Filesystem flags:         signed_directory_hash
Default mount options:    (none)
Filesystem state:         clean
Errors behavior:          Continue
Filesystem OS type:       Linux
Inode count:              61054976
Block count:              244190000
Reserved block count:     0
Free blocks:              240306876
Free inodes:              61054965
First block:              0
Block size:               4096
Fragment size:            4096
Reserved GDT blocks:      965
Blocks per group:         32768
Fragments per group:      32768
Inodes per group:         8192
Inode blocks per group:   512
Filesystem created:       Sun Dec 28 14:22:22 2008
Last mount time:          Sun Dec 28 14:35:20 2008
Last write time:          Sun Dec 28 14:35:20 2008
Mount count:              1
Maximum mount count:      36
Last checked:             Sun Dec 28 14:22:22 2008
Check interval:           15552000 (6 months)
Next check after:         Fri Jun 26 15:22:22 2009
Reserved blocks uid:      0 (user root)
Reserved blocks gid:      0 (group root)
First inode:              11
Inode size:               256
Required extra isize:     28
Desired extra isize:      28
Journal inode:            8
Default directory hash:   half_md4
Directory Hash Seed:      0bda5622-6cc2-4a1a-8135-c3f810580d43
Journal backup:           inode blocks
Journal size:             128M

• /dev/sda1 has 7453 block groups.
• Inode size is 256 bytes.
• 8192 inodes for each block group.

7453 * 256 * 8192 makes 15630073856 bytes (15263744 KiB) for inode space.

15327928 – 15263744 = 64184 unexplained KiB left

Besides one primary superblock, 18 extra backup superblocks are stored on the disk. A superblock is 256 bytes, though it is stored in a 4 KiB block. 19 * 4096 makes 77824 bytes (76 KiB).

64184 – 76 = 64108 unexplained KiB left

If someone has an explanation for it, please leave a reply.

61054976 inodes means there can be stored over 61 million files on the formatted 917 GiB. This is way too much for me. 10% of it is enough too, so there will also be less space needed for storing the inodes. Formatting the disk with option -i 131072 sould better fit me.