Dolphin showing 5% of disk used even though its not?

[tahlil]

So dolphin is showing 5% of my disk being filled even though through the KDE Partition Manager it is shown not. Should i be worried ?

[Mirdarthos]

Hi @tahlil, and welcome!

That is fine, AFAIK. Because the disc itself contains data about itself, metadata. That data obviously takes up space.

And so Dolphin takes it into account. Since it’s a file manager, that has to keep track of such things. Partition manager, on the other hand, manages your partitions which aren’t files.

[tahlil]

I’m primarily scared cause 5% of 931.51 is like 46GB. Would the Hard disk information really take that much storage away ?

[Aragorn]

Welcome to the forum!

The first thing you should realize is that a partition is not the same thing as a filesystem. A partition commonly has a filesystem on it, but in and of itself, a partition is only a reserved section of a storage medium.

Now, once the partition has been formatted with a journaling filesystem such as ext4 or btrfs, part of the filesystem becomes reserved for (among other things) the filesystem journal and is therefore “in use”. And 5% seems about right, yes.

As for whether you should be worried, I don’t see why. Or at least, not with regard to this particular subject. There may be other things to worry about, such as climate change, war, and so on…

[tahlil]

Ah i understand, thank you

[anon51566685]

If it’s not your root drive, you can disable reserved blocks with tune2fs.

And even if it is, with large drives 5% is absolutely too much and you can lower that number to, say, 0.05% or whatever.

sudo tune2fs -m 0.05 /dev/sda1