At home, I have an ubuntu linux box that I use to store all my media. I have multiple terabytes in this thing and it always seems like I am adding more and more hard drives to up the storage capacity. I found a really awesome command line tweak that will give 5% more space for each drive. So if we’re talking about a 1 terabyte drive, that’s another 50 gigs we can gain!

Here’s the deal, by default linux reserves 5% of every drive for the root user so that the operating system can still write to the disk even if it is “full”. Now this is great for the main linux partition, but for media storage that’s overkill. I’d rather have 50 gigs to store more media than have it reserved for the OS and just waste away.

Assuming your hard drive is formatted in ext2/ext3, just run this command to modify the reserved space percentage:

sudo tune2fs -m 0 /dev/sdb1

This example reserves 0% of the drive, but you can up that if needed. Also make sure to plugin your correct partition since it might not be sdb1. Running this command doesn’t affect the data on your drive, so its safe to use on a drive with stuff already on it.