From: unruh@invalid.ca   
      
   On 2012-11-15, TJ  wrote:   
   > On 11/13/2012 04:09 PM, Adam wrote:   
   >> TJ wrote:   
   >>> Just bought a 1TB external portable drive.   
   >> [...]   
   >>   
   >> In short, I'd suggest making it into several partitions based on your   
   >> particular needs, and there's nothing wrong with leaving some of it   
   >> unpartitioned for now.  Allow a day or more for full r/w testing of all   
   >> the partitions, although of course you can use your computer for   
   >> anything else during that.  I'd recommend a thorough r/w test at the   
   >> start, before you have any important data on it and while it's still   
   >> easy to return or exchange should there be any problems.   
   >>   
   >>   
   > Naturally, being the kind of person I am, I'm ignoring part of your   
   > advice for the moment, and using another part.   
   >   
   > For the moment, I believe I'm going to leave it as one big partition, in   
   > ext4 format. But, 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. Made me suspicious, so I did a format,   
   > telling MCC yes, I wanted to check for bad blocks. I used my main   
   > computer, started it about 8PM, and it was done the next morning. Also a   
   > bit surprising. 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. Most disturbing.   
      
   Linux automatically reserves a certain percentage for root use only (eg   
   jounal, emergency use,...), so   
   that if some user stupidly fills the disk, the disk is still useable by   
   root to recover.   
      
   This percentage (it used to be 10% ) is adjustable in formatting.   
   man mke2fs   
   "-m reserved-blocks-percentage   
                 Specify the percentage of the filesystem blocks  reserved for   
                 the  super-user.   This avoids fragmentation, and allows root-   
                 owned daemons, such as syslogd(8),  to  continue  to function   
                 correctly  after  non-privileged  processes are prevented from   
                 writing to the filesystem.  The default percentage is 5%.   
      
      
   Also be careful of GiB and GB. Disk manufacturers like to quote in   
   decimal bytes, while operating systems etc use power of 2 bytes   
   (1GB=2^30 Bytes, not 10^9 bytes).   
      
   >   
   > So now I'm doing it again, only I'm using my secondary computer. (Nice   
   > thing about having a secondary computer - it's perfect for tasks like   
   > this.) This time, I emptied the original partition, and am creating a   
   > new ext4 partition in its place, again telling MCC to check for bad   
   > blocks. I started it around noon yesterday, and it's still at it, 19   
   > hours later. (Not sure why the difference, as both computers run at   
   > about the same speed and both use USB 2.0, as does the drive, but I   
   > suspect it's because the block size is smaller. Smaller blocks = more   
   > blocks to check = more time to check them.)   
   >   
   > I'll give it a few more hours, probably until late tonight, and see what   
   > happens. If I get results that make more sense, I'll reconsider having   
   > multiple partitions.   
   >   
   > TJ   
   >   
      
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