Ext4 users - remember to reduce reserved blocks!

Tutorials & Guides
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By default ext4 reserves 5% of your disk for the root user. That made sense in 1999, but that’s insane now. You can run this command (as root) to reduce reserved blocks to around 4GB. On a 16TB ext4 file-system that will free up 795GB (since the default of 5% reserved = 800GB reserved for root!).

tune2fs -r 1000000 /dev/<disk-device>

This instantly frees up the space. You don’t need to unmount or remount or restart or anything.

But first use “lsblk” and “df” commands to identify the ext4 file-systems to tune.

And be careful! Running any command directly against any /dev/<disk-device> file as root is always dangerous. Practice on a computer/drive that’s not important first.

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Wouldn’t this be better? You just do it by percentage and tell it to reduce reserved space to 0%:

tune2fs -m 0 /dev/yourdrive

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I knew this now you mention it but completely forgot about it. Thank you both; you’ve just bought me a few hours more plotting before my next batch of Western Digital Elements drives turn up from the nice Amazon man.

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A good reminder, but storage_jm has already documented the optimal way to format “final destination” drives since March:

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -T largefile4 -L <drivename> /dev/sdX
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Very good point! Now that I think about it, reserved blocks really only make sense for the “/” partition (and I guess /var if it’s a separate mount). For everything else it’s just silly!

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Oh yeah! I forgot I did this. That’s why tune2fs didn’t do anything :laughing:

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while we’re talking about linux filesystem things…

Don’t just assume that just because it’s 2021 linux will handle TRIM for you at mount.

You need to actually either setup a very frequent trimfs cron job, or mount with discard. You need to use a filesystem that actually supports it (not exfat).

I wasted a lot of time trying to figure out why my plots were running so slowly. Turns out my ssd was deeply disoriented, because trim wasn’t running at all.

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This is all great info that I had previously missed. Thanks for sharing!

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Edit: I didn’t see topic and created my own thread. Basically the same thing that everyone else has seen. Gained back 5% of my plot drives.

FYI if you’re using ext4 as the format of your destination drives, or even tmp drives that get close to 100% capacity, If you used the defaults when formatting the drive it will reserve 5% of the capacity of the partition for root process purposes.

If you aren’t using the partition for your Linux root/home directory you can bump this reserved space down to 0 and shouldn’t run into issues, adding 5% capacity for storing more plots.

To check if you have reserved blocks on a plot drive, these were the commands I found useful:

Get the list of partitions:
df -h

For each partition that’s ext4 run this to check if there are reserved blocks:
tune2fs -l /dev/partition | grep 'Reserved'

Finally, use tune2fs to set the reserve blocks to 0:
tune2fs -r 0 /dev/partition

As far as I can tell this is safe to run and will not reformat the drive (I did it without problems AFAIK).

If you’re starting from an empty drive, you can use the -m parameter to set the % of blocks reserved to 0.

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More discussion on that here:

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Thank you - this was super helfpul!

To be fair, trim was running but weekly rather than daily. From this:

I learned that fstrim is managed by systemctl.

the command:
systemctl status fstrim.timer
reveals how often trim is set to run

and by editing my fstrim.timer file:
sudo nano /usr/lib/systemd/system/fstrim.timer

i was able to change:
OnCalendar=weekly

to
OnCalendar=daily

then I reloaded my systemctl daemon
systemctl daemon-reload

and I think that’s all sorted now.

Cheers for highlighting it, much appcreciated!

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hi why doesn’t it work for me?
hdd formatted on ext4

sudo mkfs.ext4 -m 0 -T largefile4 -L HDD5 /dev/sda
mke2fs 1.45.5 (07-Jan-2020)
/dev/sda contains a ext4 file system labelled ‘HDD5’
last mounted on Wed Aug 4 08:35:11 2021
Proceed anyway? (y,N) y
/dev/sda is mounted; will not make a filesystem here!

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Days thinking and calculating why I don’t have the expected TiB of plots until I’ve seen it in this thread!

:sweat_smile:

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Even with -r 0, you won’t get as much space as you would with NTFS :sweat_smile:

Use NTFS unless you think space is not important in Chia’s farming.

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Does anyone have any idea how we can make the “sudo tune2fs -r 0 /dev/$disk” command permanent? I guess I can create a script and cron job to run said script to do this. I was just wondering if there was a command to make this persistent?

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I’ve done “sudo tune2fs -r 0 /dev/$disk” on my usb hard disk’s and the change is permanent after reboot.

:question:

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How many plots if everyone getting on a 18tb. I am getting 164 plots when I use ext4 and 165 plots when I use NTFS. Better to use NTFS, even though it is slow to copy plots.