Formating UFS with Disk Utility vs. newfs

[dm2243]

I'm trying to format a 120GB FW drive that is to be shared between OS X and Linux. So I'm going with UFS. After formatting with Apple's Disk Utility in Tiger, the gross disk size is 108GB -- which seems like a huge loss factor (117GB - 108GB = 9GB!)

Is that normal for formatting UFS, or is the loss factor a function of Apple's Disk Utility? In which case, does anyone have any experience using the newfs command to cut down on lost GBs? (e.g., by changing the cluster size)

Or could it be that this particular FW drive (Prolific PL3507) is just very inefficient?

thanks in advance

[DeltaMac]

If the labeled actual size of the disk is 117 GB, then you actually have 108.96 GB , it's all in the math, not the formatting used.
117,000,000,000 Bytes / 1024 Bytes/KB / 1024 KB/MB / 1024 MB/GB = 108.96 GB
There is a small overhead due to the format process, but probably less than 10-20 MB