Linux Mint Forums

I made the jump.

After sampling a dozen or so Linux distros, I've finally found the one to replace my Windows (Win2003) desktop. Linux Mint, for me, is the right blend of power and luxury, and has the looks to boot. Thank you for such an awesome distro.

I have a question on the file systems; specifically ext2 and 3. I've read the pages on ext2, 3, 4, and journalling on wikipedia. So, I'm at least familiar with them. However, I have a question.

I have a 160 gig external hard drive. The operating system (Windows & Linux) reports that the drive has 150 gigs available; this is probably do to the differences in how drive manufacturers and software programmers count.

Anyways, in Linux, when I format the drive as NTFS, I get 149.something GB free space. When I format ext2 or ext3 I get 140.4 and 140.2 GB free space respectively. Ok, so the 200 meg difference between ext2 and 3 is the journalling file; I can buy that. But, where does the rest go? Why do I lose almost 10 gigs of free space?

Thanks.

Could it be recalculated between the two kinds of Gbytes one more time?
You should really check with something else to see what really happened
But it sounds strange....

Doubtful... as formatting NTFS, JFS, or XFS yield 149 gigs, instead of 140. anyways, it's not really an issue for me as I've decided to go with JFS.