'cannot determine free space on drive' - all the time - new drives - Help needed

[n9nu]

Hello

I don't know whats going on, but several times I have encountered this bug that is seriously starting to aggravate me and I need to know WHY it happens so much and what can I do to successfully import a FreeNAS 8.x 'ZFS' drive that I KNOW doesn't have errors (unless FreeNAS) is causing them.

I bought 4 new WD Velociraptor SATA-3 600GB 10K drives to attach to my Adaptec 1430SA PCI-E SATA-2 RAID card and pre-formatted them via ZFS via FreeNAS only to re-boot sometimes to encounter this PIA error:

Unable to calculate drive space...blah, blah, etc.

These drives are setup as a JBOD array (no RAID) with the controller card being fully supported in FreeNAS.

I xfered 20GB worth of uncompressed audio files for a client of ours only to find out (after resetting the PC) that 2 of the drives come back with that error.

I DO NOT have assigned or created a 'dataset' or any of the other options, however, I need advice on 'Do I need to create a 'dataset' or can I just connect them with each being it's own separate drive (which is what I have been doing) ?? I assume a 'dataset' combines all drives into one big one (so to speak)

What I would like to know (and I know this is not easy to expect) is if I am screwing things up OR if there in deed IS a problem with FreeNAS and it's relationship to ZFS data drives. If I know for a fact (if all else is okay) from the programmers here that I can somehow 're-initialize' or 'fix' these errors so the drive is readable, I will wait until the issues get fixed OR leave the damn machine on 24/7 with a room full of deep cycle marine batteries to ensure the UPS will do it's part for a LONG time until power is restored (if I loose power of course at first)

So, if anyone can provide some concrete information on:

1. How to correct the 'disk space error' WITHOUT having to do the usual re-format crap and loose everything - via the CLI

2. Dataset: In my case (no RAID, just JBOD), do I need to use this 'dataset' option for any reason? I prefer to have each physical drive setup as it's own drive.

I am in NO way angry at anyone nor am I bashing anyone/thing, but rather just trying to finally understand this issue and fond out once and for all if I can 'reset' or fix the drive volume so that FreeNAS will play nice with the space issue.

 

[ProtoSD]

I can't answer why this is happening, it seems to be happening to a lot of people.

Here's what you could try from the command line. Do a 'df', see if your array is mounted and if you can 'cd' to it and look at files. Maybe it's just a GUI problem not being able to find the mountpoint and share it or. From my understanding, a dataset in a basic way is just another folder stored on your array, but with the ability to set stuff like quotas and other stuff.

If you can see your array from the command line and cd to it and look at stuff. You might try a 'zpool export pool-name', and then try and do an 'Auto-Import' from the GUI.

I don't know what is causing this, but those are just a couple of things to look at/try.

Post back and let us know and maybe someone else has some other ideas.