How much space do I have for the file system?

Question

I need to know how much space I have. There are two 2TB hard drives. The first has three partitions. The third partition seems to be the filesystem partition and it has 2TB available. In Settings > About, it tells me I have 31.0 GiB, and a disk capacity of 4.1 TB.

I wouldn’t think that programming uses a huge amount of hard disk on the Linux computer. If I have 2 TB of, I wouldn’t expect to run out. What I want to do is have most of one drive for the filesystem. I would be happy to have the second drive ether serve as additional space for the filesystem, or space for me to store documents, images, etc. In one article I read, it suggested the second drive should have a mount point at /home. That would be fine.

Here are my questions:

How much space does the filesystem have available, and if only 31 GB, do I need to expand that partition to make more space available?

What is the Microsoft Reserved partition ? Should I leave it ?

Is the second drive a single partition ? Is it formatted ? How should I format it, what filesystem ?

What follows is all the information I have gathered from Settings>About, from Disks, and from typing df -h into terminal.

Dell Precision 3460
Memory      31.0 GiB
Processor       12th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-12700 × 20
Graphics        NV167 / Mesa Intel® Graphics (ADL-S GT1)
Disk Capacity       4.1 TB
OS Name     Ubuntu 20.04.6 LTS
OS Type     64-bit
Gnome Version   3.36.8
Windowing System    X11

Drive 1
Model           PC801 NVMe SK hynix 2TB (51003141)
Size            2.0 TB (2,048,408,248,320 bytes)
Partitioning        GUID Partition Table
Serial Number       SJBAN43821400A65F


    Partition 1     ESP Partition 1  996 MB FAT
    Size            996 MB — 875 MB free (12.1% full)
    Device          /dev/nvme0n1p1
    UUID            F22C-2D58
    Partition Type      EFI System
    Contents        FAT (32-bit version) — Mounted at /boot/efi

    Partition 2     OS Partition 2  8.6 GB FAT
    Size            8.6 GB (8,589,934,592 bytes)
    Device          /dev/nvme0n1p2
    UUID            E844-683F
    Partition Type      Microsoft Reserved
    Contents        FAT (32-bit version) — Not Mounted


    Partition 3     Filesystem Partition 3  2.0 TB Ext4
    Size            2.0 TB — 2.0 TB free (2.0% full)
    Device          /dev/nvme0n1p3
    UUID            48752f58-52ee-4666-ae9f-3a1903063253
    Partition Type      Linux Filesystem
    Contents        Ext4 (version 1.0) — Mounted at Filesystem Root


Drive 2     2.0 TB Unknown
Model           PC801 NVMe SK hynix 2TB (51003141)
Size            2.0 TB (2,048,408,248,320 bytes)
Partitioning        
Serial Number        SJBAN43821400A65H

    Size        2.0 TB (2,048,408,248,320 bytes)
    Device      /dev/nvme1n1
    Contents    Unknown

---

$ df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted                       on
udev            16G   0     16G    0%    /dev    
tmpfs           3.2G  2.5M  3.2G   1%    /run    
/dev/nvme0n1p3  1.9T  8.4G  1.8T   1%    /       
tmpfs           16G   0     16G    0%    /dev/shm
tmpfs           5.0M  4.0K  5.0M   1%    /run/lock
tmpfs           16G   0     16G    0%    /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop0      128K  128K  0      100%  /snap/bare/5
/dev/loop1      64M   64M   0      100%  /snap/core20/1828
/dev/loop2      50M   50M   0      100%  /snap/snapd/18357
/dev/loop4      347M  347M  0      100%  /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/119
/dev/loop3      46M   46M   0      100%  /snap/snap-store/638
/dev/loop5      92M   92M   0      100%  /snap/gtk-common-themes/1535
/dev/nvme0n1p1  946M  112M  835M   12%   /boot/efi
tmpfs           3.2G  116K  3.2G   1%    /run/user/1000
/dev/loop6      39M   39M   0      100%  /snap/snapd/21759
/dev/loop7      64M   64M   0      100%  /snap/core20/2318
/dev/loop8      350M  350M  0      100%  /snap/gnome-3-38-2004/143

Answer 1

How much space do I have?

The command df abbreviation for disk free shows your partitions. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Df_(Unix), You may also run df --help to get all of the switches and their functions.

The system partition is the disk partition that contains the operating system folder, known as the system root. By default, in Linux, operating system files are mounted at / (the root directory). Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_partition_and_boot_partition

So in your case:

Filesystem      Size  Used  Avail  Use%  Mounted                       on
udev            16G   0     16G    0%    /dev    
tmpfs           3.2G  2.5M  3.2G   1%    /run    
/dev/nvme0n1p3  1.9T  8.4G  1.8T   1%    /      

It means you have 1.8T available in that partition.