FreeNAS Newbie/Sanity Check question regarding available space on volume.

[Michael Hanna]

Okay, so I'm a newbie with regards to FreeNAS but have been using RAID on on both enterprise hardware as well as using both Synology and QNAP products. I've been considering going the FreeNAS route for awhile now and finally pulled the trigger. My hardware is as follows:

Supermicro X10SRH-CLN4F motherboard
64 Gigs ECC Ram
8X 6TB WD Red Pro HDD's (Plugged into SAS controller flashed with IT firmware)
FreeNAS installed on USB
FreeNAS 11

My question is this... when setting up the volume I went with RaidZ2. It showed I should have ~30 TiB if space. Which I thought was about right based on using a RAIDZ calculator posted on another post in this forum. According the calculator I should have had about ~30Tib of data space. After my Volume was built and datasets created I see that I only have ~19 Tib of space usable. This seems a little low to me with 8X 6TB drives as compared to my QNAP that has the same number and capacity drives with a RAID6 volume which provides me with ~27TB of usable space. Before I continue with moving my massive amounts of data over to my FreeNAS box I wanted to make sure I didnt screw anything up when I setup the volume. Attached is a screenshot of the Storage tab in the web GUI. I've been plowing through the forums for a few days now and can't see where I did anything wrong... so this is just a sanity check for myself. I was hoping I would have more space to use than is what is showing.

 

[BigDave]

After my Volume was built and datasets created I see that I only have ~19 Tib of space usable.

I must be missing something here. You seem to have placed 10.2 TiB of data in your dataset named *Video*
that shows 34% (space used) AND lz4 compression is off on that dataset as well
I'm sorry but I fail to see any "missing" space...

 

[Michael Hanna]

I must be missing something here. You seem to have placed 10.2 TiB of data in your dataset named *Video*
that shows 34% (space used) AND lz4 compression is off on that dataset as well
I'm sorry but I fail to see any "missing" space...

And perhaps that is true... I've been using FreeNAS for 2 days now... and still learning. Now that you mention it the math does seem to indicate that the total space is 28TiB and not 19.2 Tib.... 10.2TiB/28.3TiB = 33% usage. I was just not reading the table correctly. I turned off the compression on that dataset since it is all mp4's and mkv's. Didnt figure I would see much in the way of compression on that type of data. Thanks for pointing that out.

 

[Jailer]

Same conclusion here. And same question, why did you disable compression on your video dataset?

 

[Michael Hanna]

Thanks for the quick responses guys... I see know how I was misreading the table. Makes perfect sense now... just a rookie mistake.

 

[BigDave]

I turned off the compression on that dataset since it is all mp4's and mkv's. Didnt figure I would see much in the way of compression on that type of data.

With compressed file types such as you mentioned, you will not see any real benefit. On the other hand,
there's no benefit to turning it off AFAIK. I leave that setting to default (on) status for my all my datasets.

I've been plowing through the forums for a few days now and can't see where I did anything wrong... so this is just a sanity check for myself.

I personally wish to commend your work ethic before posting a question, we appreciate the effort.
Even though I've been hangin' out in here for a while, when I have a question, my first effort is to see if the
Manual has anything on the subject. FreeNAS has Top Shelf documentation which if utilized,
can save time in copious amounts

 

[gpsguy]

It's a common problem. Often users see the numbers on the first line and are convinced that they've lost storage space.

btw, if you'd like an offline copy of the docs, see the link in my signature.

I see know how I was misreading the table