Re: [gentoo-user] Getting maximum space out of a hard drive

[Dale]

William Kenworthy wrote:
>
> On 25/8/22 06:45, Frank Steinmetzger wrote:
>>> [..]
>>> Also, if you're using ext2/3/4, there's the preset, i.e. if you're
>>> rather sure about what kind of data is going to be on there, you
>>> can tune it so that it reserves more or less place for metadata like
>>> inodes, which can be another bit.
>> When I format a partition (and I usually use ext4, with some f2fs
>> mingled in
>> on flash bashed devices), I always set the inode count myself,
>> because the
>> default was always much too high. Like 15 m on a 40 GiB partition or
>> so. My
>> arch root partition has 2 m inodes in total, 34 % of which are in use
>> for a
>> full-fledged KDE setup. That’s sufficient.
>>
>> On Gentoo, I might give it some more for the ever-growing portage
>> directory.
>> But even a few percent on a 10 TB drive amount to many gigabytes.
>>
> Keep in mind ext4 is created with a fixed number of inodes - you cant
> change it once its created so you have to deal with reformatting the
> filesystem and replacing the data.  Just another reason to use
> something more modern - running out of inodes, especially on a large
> disk is not a minor matter as you have to find somewhere to copy/store
> the data so you can reformat the disk with more inodes and then put it
> back.  I seem to remember the last time it happened to me (its not an
> uncommon event) I had to deal with mass corruption too.
>
> On the other hand, at one inode per file and Dale primarily storing
> large media files it may be safe to reduce them.
>
> BillK

I've already got data on the drive now with the default settings so it
is to late for the moment however, I expect to need to add drives
later.  Keep in mind, I use LVM which means I grow file systems quite
often by adding drives.  I don't know if that grows inodes or not.  I
suspect it does somehow.  This is my current inodes on drives inside my
puter.  I removed the cruft from the list.


root@fireball / # df -i
Filesystem                       Inodes   IUsed     IFree IUse% Mounted on
/dev/sda6                       1525920   18519   1507401    2% /
/dev/mapper/OS-usr        2564096  752882   1811214   30% /usr
/dev/sda1                        98392    1219     97173    2% /boot
/dev/mapper/OS-var        3407872  322463   3085409   10% /var
/dev/mapper/home-home--lv 183144448  727910 182416538    1% /home
/dev/mapper/backup-backup  45793280 1359825  44433455    3% /backup
/dev/mapper/crypt         488378368   43027 488335341    1%
/home/dale/Desktop/Crypt
root@fireball / #


The portage tree is on /var on my system.  The ones I am most curious
about is the /home and the crypt one.  As you can see, /home and crypt
is using only a tiny fraction of inodes.  Here is the interesting bit:


root@fireball / # df -h
Filesystem                 Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda6                   23G  2.2G   20G  10% /
/dev/mapper/OS-usr          39G   22G   15G  61% /usr
/dev/sda1                  373M  187M  167M  53% /boot
/dev/mapper/OS-var          52G   23G   26G  47% /var
/dev/mapper/home-home--lv  5.5T  2.6T  2.9T  48% /home
/dev/mapper/backup-backup  688G  369G  319G  54% /backup
/dev/mapper/crypt           15T   12T  3.1T  79% /home/dale/Desktop/Crypt
root@fireball / #


As you can see, /home is about half full, crypt however is pushing 80%
pretty hard.  On /home, I have my documents directory and it has lots of
smaller files compared to crypt.  While /home does have some videos, it
also contains my camera picture directory and the directories for my
trail cameras.  Also, it has small documents such as recipes and such
which can be anywhere from a few kilobytes to maybe 1MB or so, not many
much larger than that.  While I may not want to reduce /home much, I
could likely reduce crypt by 90% and still have a lot left over,
provided that changes when I grow the file system as I add drives etc. 
Yes, I'm already on the hunt for another hard drive to add onto crypt. 

Is there a tool to tell the average size of files in a directory?  Tools
that would help us to know how many inodes one actually needs?  As it
is, I'm doing a lot of updating of old files with larger files, due to
higher resolution of videos.  Example, some videos are going from a
little below 720p to 720p or 1080p.  The difference in file size is
pretty large.  Sometimes double or more. 

This is interesting to consider here.  One doesn't want to run out of
inodes but at the same time, even if I only had 10% of the number I have
now for crypt I'd still have 10 times more than I need with the thing
almost full. This is also true for my backup drives as well.  Two of
them at least.  One that has documents I'd likely leave as is. 

I'm going to have to work on better storage somehow.  All of this is
going to crop up again eventually, likely sooner rather than later. 

Dale

:-)  :-) 

P. S.  I have to close my VPN to check emails still.  Pardon the time
lag in replies compared to the past.