From: adam@address.invalid   
      
   TJ wrote:   
   > On 11/13/2012 04:09 PM, Adam wrote:   
   >>> Just bought a 1TB external portable drive.   
   >> [...]   
   >> In short, I'd suggest making it into several partitions based on your   
   >> particular needs [...]  Allow a day or more for full r/w testing of all   
   >> the partitions   
   >>   
   > Naturally, being the kind of person I am, I'm ignoring part of your   
   > advice for the moment, and using another part.   
      
   That's fine with me, as long as you've considered it before rejecting it   
   (as I can see you've done).  One of my pet peeves is people who ask me   
   questions but don't even pay attention to my answers.  Also, other   
   replies in this thread have given you good advice IMHO, especially not   
   using NTFS and keeping journaling on.   
      
   > I'm checking for bad blocks as we type. Actually, this   
   > is the second test. On the first one, I used Mageia's MCC and simply   
   > changed the file system from NTFS to ext4. That happened surprisingly   
   > quickly - almost instantly.   
      
   I'm not familiar with the details of ext4, but for many filesystems,   
   formatting just involves writing the "system overhead" for that   
   partition and zeroing the root directory, which takes almost no time.   
      
   > I did a format, telling MCC yes, I wanted to check for bad blocks.   
      
   Does that do a read-only test, or a read-write test?  I'd recommend the   
   r/w test, at least this first time.  I'm not sure which MCC does as I've   
   always used 'mke2fs' from the command line, but searching the output of   
   "ps -e" should show you whether mke2fs or e2fsck is using '-c' (r/o) or   
   '-cc' (r/w).   
      
   > When I checked with a df, I saw that it had the same   
   > 931GB of the NTFS system, but only 870-odd were available, and if I add   
   > the amount used to the amount available I came up with a very large   
   > amount unaccounted for.   
      
   That happens on my system too with ext4, so I suppose it's "normal" for   
   ext3/4.  System overhead, I'd guess, including the journal, copies of   
   the superblock, and other things.  This partition has no files at all:   
      
   Filesystem     Type  Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on   
   /dev/sdb7      ext4   50G  180M   47G   1% /mnt/hotbu0   
      
   yet you can see about 3 GB (6%) is unavailable for my use.  You'll have   
   to decide whether the features and advantages of ext4 are worth the ~60   
   GB (again ~6%) of disk space.   
      
   Adam   
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