Disk's formatted size different than Windows?

[johnblanker]

I have a 2TB drive and two 1TB drives striped together (no parity) on my freeNAS system. I have the same array of disks on my Windows7 machine spanned together. The usable formatted space between these systems is different.

These two arrays' data are synced. Freenas array says 193GB free of 4.45TB. Windows says 270GB free of 4.54TB.

Is this normal, and is there any way to increase the space of the disks in freeNAS? Would like to get that 77GB back!

 

[joelmusicman]

I'm guessing that might be jails, system, and swap space?

You're definitely getting pretty full, so your performance is probably suffering. Some pretty funky stuff happens if you hit 100% though. FreeNAS is much happier below 90-95%.

 

[HoneyBadger]

Correct my math if I'm off, but 2TB + 1TB + 1TB = 4TB.

How on earth are you getting >4TB total reported by any operating system here?

The operating systems should be reporting less, since they see disks as TiB, not TB.

 

[johnblanker]

Oh, right. Woops. I have two 2TB and one 1TB drives.

I'm not using Jails. I just use this box to share media files to my streaming boxes. Nothing else. Would love if there was a way to get that 77GB back. What do you mean by swap space, like a pagefile? I did not check "export recycle bin", so that means there is no recycle bin right? I guess 77GB lost is not that bad. That's only ~2 BD rips:(

 

[cyberjock]

ZFS' metadata consumes more space than NTFS. You have checksums and such. I'm not sure I'd buy that its 77GB, but that's actually mathematically possible.

Snapshots, reservations, and other settings can really mess the numbers up. So unless you understand everything you setup you might just have to accept that you've lost 77GB to using ZFS.

 

[johnblanker]

yeah, I think so. And no, I don't understand everything in my setup.

 

[HoneyBadger]

That makes a lot more sense.

"5TB" (decimal, marketing TB's) converts to 4.54TiB (binary, computer-reported TB's) so there's your raw pool size.

ZFS reserves a certain amount of your space - I believe 1/64th - for metadata and other overhead. As @cyberjock mentioned, ZFS stores a lot more in its metadata than NTFS does.

4.54TiB divided by 64 yields roughly 72.6GiB, which is about what you're missing.

With that said, your pool setup scares me. You're aware it has no parity, which is fine, but you're not really getting any advantage from ZFS's self-healing and resilience to errors by having a zero-redundancy setup. Kind of like using a Ferrari to get groceries.

 

[johnblanker]

I fee more comfortable having a 1:1 backup. I have the exact setup of HDD on my pc and use freefilesync to keep them in sync every week or so. Feel more comfy doing this. Been doing this for years, just got tired of firing up the pc for streaming media. Got the SONOS system which requires music on a "server" and that sparked the whole idea of creating a NAS out of leftover (old) parts.

Because I am not using parity, I question the importance of using ECC memory in my situation. Because my board is so old, it's going to cost me around $200 just for four 2GB sticks. I'm just serving BD rips to my WDTV Live smp. And backing up pc data from 2 clients.

 

[HoneyBadger]

You're definitely playing Russian Roulette with your data in my opinion, but as long as you're perfectly aware that you're doing that, there's no harm.

Just be aware that you're one bad drive or stick of RAM away from having to re-rip that ~4TB of media. ;)

 

[joeschmuck]

I'm not sure I'd use ZFS in your build, wouldn't UFS be a better fit for what you are doing.

 

[johnblanker]

I have the same exact hdd setup in an esata box hooked up to my pc. The data is synced. 10TB total. 5 in freenas. 5 in the esata box. Of course this setup is the most expensive. But i have a 1:1 backup. If i did parity and lost the whole thing id be screwed. Perhaps the best is doing parity on the freenas AND have the backup. I know its expensive but i spent a lot of time ripping all this stuff.

 

[johnblanker]

I thought about ufs. What would be the advantages? The one thing i would really want is the ability to add drives to the whole array without having to rebuild it. Anyway. Should i do ufs instead?