Inode Capacity Planner

Estimate whether file-count growth or stored bytes becomes the limiting filesystem resource.

Planning model only: this page never reads, modifies, formats, mounts, or tunes a filesystem. Byte capacity and inode capacity are modeled independently. Results omit allocation blocks, sparse files, compression, snapshots, copy-on-write, reserved inodes, xattrs, journals, filesystem-specific metadata, deletion lag, and workload variability unless represented by your assumptions.

Filesystem baseline

Filesystem capacity

Capacity unit

Currently used storage

Used unit

Inode capacity input

Total inodes

Used inodes

Free inodes (optional cross-check)

Reserved/unavailable bytes (%)

One new directory per N files

New symlinks (% of new files)

Metadata bytes per new inode

SI units use powers of 1000; IEC units use powers of 1024. In bytes-per-inode mode, total inodes are estimated as floor(filesystem bytes ÷ density), while used inodes still come from the baseline field.

File populations

Class	Current count	Average bytes/file	New files/day	Retention days (0 = unlimited)	Action

JSON preserves class names exactly. CSV prefixes spreadsheet-formula-like names with an apostrophe for safety.

Projection

Model interpretation

Illustrative ext-style inode density

These examples only show how an ext-family formatter might express inode density. They are not recommendations, do not inspect feature support, and are never run:

mkfs.ext4 -i 16384 /dev/EXAMPLEmkfs.ext4 -T news /dev/EXAMPLE

Formatting destroys existing filesystem contents. Choose density only during filesystem creation and follow your operating system and filesystem documentation.