Why is my resized volume smaller than I expected?
If you resize your volume and the size or available space doesn’t match what you expected, there may be several reasons why:
-
The size of the filesystem that
df
reports may be slightly less than the total disk size because some amount of the disk is reserved for filesystem metadata. -
The sum of used and available space will be slightly less than the reported total size because a small amount of space is reserved for the root user (typically 5% by default), and
df
does not report this space.You can modify the reserved filesystem blocks and other filesystem parameters with
tune2fs
for ext4 filesystems andxfs_io
for XFS filesystems. -
Different tools report size in different units, like gigabytes (1 GB = 1000 bytes) or gibibytes (1 GiB = 1024 bytes). For example,
df -h
reports size in powers of 1024, like GiB, anddf -H
reports sizes in powers of 1000, like GB. 500 GiB is approximately 536 GB.