To find device name of a mounted directory:
findmnt /path/to/directory
For example in a Fedora machine:
findmnt /run/media/[username]/[external_hdd_label]
The first command show disk usage by files and the second ones shows only inode disk usage
df -h .
df -hi .
To create an ext4 partition:
mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdx
To see the default parameters see /etc/mke2fs.conf. For more information read this article.
You can see ext4 attributes using the following command:
tune2fs -l /dev/sdxx
Usually %5 of disk is reserved. You can check it using tune2fs. For example:
# tune2fs -l /dev/sdc2 | grep -i block
Block count: 976702976
Reserved block count: 48835148
Free blocks: 377076996
First block: 0
Block size: 4096
As you can see in the above example we are using [Reserved block count] * [Block size] bytes as reserved. As you can see [Reserved block count] / [Block count] = 0.05. You can reduce the reserved space from %5 to %1 using the following command:
# tune2fs -m 1 /dev/device
If you want to set the reserved space absolutely, you can use -r instead of -m. You need to specify reserved block count for -r.