on 9-25-2008 4:58 PM William L. Maltby spake the following:
On Thu, 2008-09-25 at 19:31 -0400, Robert Moskowitz wrote:
I just reformatted an 8Gb USB drive as ext3.
While as FAT32, it was reported as having well over 7Gb free (did not note the exact capacity).
I reformatted with mkfs.ext3 /dev/sda1
Now it is reported (oh, this is with properties in Nautilus) as having 6.8Gb capacity (free space actually).
Does this makes sense that ext3 has less available space than fat32?
Yes, for the reasons the others posted. However, if you know the "profile" of what you'll have on there, a substantial amount of space can be recovered by 1) make sure you have large block size and 2) reducing the i-nodes allocated to suit.
Do a little thinking before you make these adjustments. I've used these (along with the reducing root-reserved) for years w/o problems. But if you get too radical and/or miss the reality with your profile substantially, you'll be in a "rework" scenario.
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Also, depending on the makeup of the fat32 partition it would develop a lot of slack space (space taken up by the slack in the clusters).
So although fat32 looked like it had more space when empty, it would probably fill up slightly faster.