Unaccounted for Storage space

I have a 1TB nvme drive and it appears that about 70GB of space just disappeared. the drive is listed as 931.5GB here:

Blockquote[merry@merry ~]$ lsblk
NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT
nvme0n1 259:0 0 931.5G 0 disk
├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 260M 0 part /boot/efi
└─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 931.3G 0 part /

and it ncdu shows I’m only using 48.7GB:

Blockquote— /home/merry -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
44.4 GiB [##########] /.local
1.8 GiB [ ] /Downloads
871.1 MiB [ ] /.cache
182.0 MiB [ ] /.config
52.5 MiB [ ] /.mozilla
12.1 MiB [ ] /.moonchild productions
5.3 MiB [ ] /Pictures
2.5 MiB [ ] /Documents
2.4 MiB [ ] .xsession-errors.old
864.0 KiB [ ] ncdu_output.png
476.0 KiB [ ] /.colors
76.0 KiB [ ] /.pki
68.0 KiB [ ] mozilla.pdf
68.0 KiB [ ] disk size.png
36.0 KiB [ ] /.thumbnails
32.0 KiB [ ] /.moc
28.0 KiB [ ] .xsession-errors
20.0 KiB [ ] /.i3
16.0 KiB [ ] /Desktop
16.0 KiB [ ] /.steam
12.0 KiB [ ] /.icons
8.0 KiB [ ] .viminfo
8.0 KiB [ ] Available_storage.png
8.0 KiB [ ] /.gimp-2.8
8.0 KiB [ ] .makepkg.conf
8.0 KiB [ ] .dir_colors
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Videos
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Templates
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Public
e 4.0 KiB [ ] /Music
4.0 KiB [ ] /.urxvt
4.0 KiB [ ] .bashrc
4.0 KiB [ ] .bash_history
4.0 KiB [ ] .Xresources
4.0 KiB [ ] .xinitrc
Total disk usage: 47.3 GiB Apparent size: 48.7 GiB Items: 31270

But somehow I have 811.5GB remaining according to my system resource monitor panel (it’s the default that comes with manjaro i3).

I would like know where the remaining 71.3GB went. Does Linux allocate storage space to something? My swap file is only 4GB

I installed manjaro architect with a minimal install, no additional packages, and I’m using i3.
Kernel version 5.9.11 if that is any help.

Hello @merryfistmas :wink:

Could you add:

sudo parted -l
df -h

Heavy I/O Load incoming:

sudo du -ha -d1 --exclude "/proc" --exclude "/sys" / | sort -hr | head -30

sudo parted -l

Blockquote Model: WDS100T3X0C-00SJG0 (nvme)
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: gpt
Disk Flags:

Number Start End Size File system Name Flags
1 1049kB 274MB 273MB fat32 boot, esp
2 274MB 1000GB 1000GB ext4

df -h

Blockquote [merry@merry ~]$ df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
dev 16G 0 16G 0% /dev
run 16G 1.5M 16G 1% /run
/dev/nvme0n1p2 916G 59G 811G 7% /
tmpfs 16G 250M 16G 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 4.0M 0 4.0M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
tmpfs 16G 8.7M 16G 1% /tmp
/dev/nvme0n1p1 256M 298K 256M 1% /boot/efi
tmpfs 3.2G 32K 3.2G 1% /run/user/1000

I think I see where the space is going. Why is there storage space assigned to all these places?

Blockquote [merry@merry ~]$ sudo du -ha -d1 --exclude “/proc” --exclude “/sys” / | sort -hr | head -30
du: cannot access ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
59G /
49G /home
5.2G /usr
4.1G /swapfile
566M /var
351M /opt
66M /boot
11M /etc
8.7M /tmp
6.1M /dev
1.5M /run
1.2M /root
16K /lost+found
12K /srv
8.0K /.m-a.log
4.0K /mnt
4.0K /.desktop
4.0K /.base
0 /.video_installed
0 /sbin
0 /lib64
0 /lib
0 /.desktop_installed
0 /bin
0 /.base_installed

Remember that certain filesystems, like ext4 and ntfs, take up a percentage of the drive space for journaling.

So 70 GB out of 1 TB seems within that journaling range.

I think I worded the first part of my question poorly. I am aware of the journaling, but on top of the 70GB used for journaling, there was another 70GB that was apparently missing.

The output from the commands in megavolt’s post showed where the extra space was being used.

So if i calculate correctly:

915G+59G=974G
1000G-974G=26G

So 26GB journal for a 1 TB drive is quite normal as @Strit said.

Ok… can you say where the 70GB were located, in which folder? I see nothing else.

Maybe on a network device?

Otherwise, if you had these 70GB of data before installation, then i guess they are lost, because you reformatted the disk.

1 Like

Keep in mind that HD’s are sold with capacities in GB, but computers use GiB :slight_smile:
For example my 4TB HD:

Disk /dev/sda: 3.64 TiB, 4000787030016 bytes

Which shows why they sell it as 4TB and not 4TiB :wink:
You get that output using sudo fdisk -l /dev/sda

df -h showed 4 directories with 16GB including tmpfs and /dev and one with 3G which combined with my swap file totals 71GB.

The lost space I was referring to was my available space being listed as 811.5GB + 48.7GB used = 860.2GB out of 931.5GB total. The difference between those two numbers is about 71GB. Anyway, thanks for the information guys.

See my explanation just above yours, it has nothing todo with space used by the formatting of the filesystem type or partition table etc…

ssd and nvme also makes use of over provision which is intentionally unallocated space.

the reason you are seemingly missing a little short of 10% could be due to this.

another reason may be parts not yet released by fstrim command

a third reason may be a need clear the memory cells as described in below link

1 Like