File System Foo

Tuesday, March 31st, 2009

So I got a new 4GB solid state drive. The reason that I bought it was because it was only $6.00. I don’t have a clue what I will use it for. But I did an interesting experiment. How much space is used for the actual file system? For controls, I used a brand new Lexar SSD drive, I used gparted to delete and make all the file systems. And no space calculations were made until I verified that there were no files at all on the system (i.e. lost+found was deleted first). This is what I found.

File System Type Space used
EXT3 262.5 MB used
EXT2 198.4 MB used
FAT16 0 Bytes used
FAT32 4.0 KB used
NTFS 19.7 MB used
reiserFS 32.8 MB used
xfs 4.2 MB used

So, why does the File System take up so much room? And why does the default linux file system take up the most in my experiment?