Reclaim Wasted Hard Disk Space on Ext Volumes
written on Wednesday, May 11, 2011
If you're running any of the Ext file systems, you can get back a lot of free space by running a simple command.
sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdX
By default, Ext systems reserve 5% of space on the file system in case it is need by the OS. This command will set the reserved system space to 0%.
For non-root volumes, keeping this reserved space around is not necessary. For a 1TB volume, this could account for up to 50GB of wasted space.