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    Okay, now that's a massive waste of 'unavailable' space. Maybe the 5% should be limited to drive sizes smaller than X (e.g. 5% of disk space to a maximum of 100MB). Commented Feb 24, 2011 at 11:44
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    On my 8 TB filesystem 400 GB just gone away - this is the real waste of space!! :) Commented Mar 27, 2013 at 17:38
  • With ext4, you can control the percentage at the time the filesystem is created with the -m reserved-blocks-percentage option. Commented Mar 21, 2020 at 1:19
  • You wouldn‘t be asking this question if you had ever administered a Linux system. There are hundreds of scenarios where you as an admin would be dead thankful to have this reserved space: - system processes jamming the log with millions of entries (X is a prominent candidate for that) - users jamming their space with absurd output (I had a student filling 30GB with ever the same line of output) - users uploading their compete photo library „just for testing“ - and others more If you hadn‘t that 5% your system would be dead. Each and every time. Commented Jun 2 at 18:52