On Mon, Aug 26, 2019 at 07:36:13AM -0400, Stefan Monnier wrote:
> - When you only store large files (e.g. videos) on the file system, you
> may end up wasting more space on the unused inodes than you'd like.
> IIRC with the default setting, about 5% of the disk space is used for
> inodes, so if you only store a couple of super-large files on it, you
> may be wasting up to 5% of your space.
I suspect you are accidentally conflating "space used by inodes" and
"space reserved for use by root". The latter defaults to 5% and is
configurable with the "-m" option in mkfs.ext4(8) and tune2fs(8).
The "bytes-per-inode" value ("-i" option) is the closest match to what
you described. The man page doesn't tell us what the default value is,
but the Arch wiki says it's one inode per 16384 bytes.
<https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ext4#Bytes-per-inode_ratio>
Since the default inode size is 256 bytes, that tells us the inodes
take about 1.5% of the space by default.
