Plex seems to have consumed HDD space

[Pontiac75]

Hello,

I recently reinstalled FreeNAS from scratch after getting my setup a bit messy and thinking that a fresh start would be the best way to go.

I've got 9.3 running with a ZFS mirrored pair of 2.5" HDD's and the Plex media server plugin installed like I had in the past but this time the jail directories seem to have copied the contents of the datatsets that they refer to.

For example, I used to have a dataset called "Video" and a dataset called "Torrents" on the array and in my previous installation of FreeNAS I used to have two directories within the Plex jail called "Video" and "Torrents" and these directories were what Plex used to refer to the actual data.

I have the same setup now (except that the jail directories are called "jail_video" and "jail_torrents"), but my jail directories look like they've physically copied all of the data over. At present the jail directories contain the same amount of data as the actual directories. This means that if I copy 1Gb of data to my Video directory on the NAS it is replicated within the Plex jail and I'm therefore losing 2GB of storage: effectively halving the capacity of my array.

Has anyone else had this problem? I can't remember exactly the guide I used to set up the Plex plugin as it was a couple of weeks ago and I've just noticed.

Is there an easy fix to this or would I be better off uninstalling Plex, deleting my jail and reinstalling it?

 

[depasseg]

Do jail_video and jail_torrents point to the video and torrent datasets in the jail configuration? If so then that is normal, and is not consuming double the space.

 

[Pontiac75]

Yep. They do point to those directories in the Plex plugin setup. If I go to each of the four directories in my file browser from a different room in the house (via CIFS) then each directory claims to be using up the same space. I.E. Torrents=65.5GB and jail_torrents=65.5GB, Video=58.4GB and jail_video=58.4GB. Is this normal?

I should also add that I originally had 2 x 320GB drives in the NAS but I got a new 500GB one for Christmas, so there is 1 x 320GB drive and 1 x 500GB drive in the mirror pair now. I understand that I will only ever get 320GB of storage space in such a configuration and I plan to buy another 500GB one some time later in the year. Since setting up this "lop-sided" configuration I get this amber flashing error when I log into the FreeNAS GUI:

"WARNING: The capacity for the volume 'BPVT_pair' is currently at 82%, while the recommended value is below 80%."

BPVT_pair is the name of my mirror (both drives are Western Digital Scorpio Blue BPVT models, one 320GB and one 500GB). This is what alerted me to checking out the size of the directories and it looks like my array is almost full, despite not having that much on it. Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu from my other PC tells me that I only have 46.1GB free on the array and I should have much more than that. I have got stuff in other datasets, such as music and documents, but it seems like the Plex jail is doubling up on my files.

 

[nick779]

I mount my media storage inside of my plex jail as read only and add it to the plex library that way. The only extra space taken is for the indexing of my movies which is around 4GB for 250 movies.

Ive never experienced what youre going through.

 

[depasseg]

You can't use CIFS clients to figure out what storage space is being used. They only understand what is being reported to them. Use the FreeNas GUI and look at the volumes tab.

The pointers you configured in your jail are only that, a pointer. The jail is actually mounting your video and torrent directories and presenting them inside the jail and calling them jail_video and jail_torrents. It is not doubling your consumed storage space. You need to look somewhere else (start at the volume tab of the GUI) to figure out where your storage is being consumed.

 

[Pontiac75]

Yeah. I know how it's supposed to work because I had pretty much the same configuration last time. Thanks: I'll check via the GUI when I get home from work.

 

[Pontiac75]

I've just checked in the GUI and I now see that some strangeness is afoot: the percentages are all out of whack. Take a look:



Any ideas?