Storage spaces incorrect used capacity

[frankr2994]

Ok strange one and I've seen it crop up on the net with no clear answer. Set a friend up with a plex server last year. I set up a mirrored refs storage pool with 4 drives 2x6gb and 2x8gb set pool size to 24gb. Actual storage is obviously 14gb minus provisioning. Right now storage spaces states low storage and that all drives are 99.99% full totalling 24.45gb. but just looking at the drive used space is only 6.78gb. Tried to run optimize through powershell and got a message that optimization cannot be run due to the disk backing the volume is full. This has been fine for a year so this is not an initial setup problem. The server is ran remotely so being that it's not checked alot I can't say what day this actually happened. We setup email notifications for any drive issues so more or less just assumed we were good.

[Dutch_Master]

There's probably backups, snapshots or other duplication stuff going on that server, his best bet is to switch those off and delete older versions manually.

[Helpful Tech Witch]

I'm assuming these are in terebyte, not gigabyte, correct?

 

[frankr2994]

Lmao yes terabyte it was late when I made the thread. Drive properties and storage pool capacity don't match. I really don't think something actually needs deleted or purged.

[frankr2994]

And it's not easy to see but I have a photo from when this got set last March. Shows free space around 2000Gb. Movie and shows have good compression so they don't take up alot of space and the library isn't that big. Took 3 years to use roughly 5Tb so when the system was rebuilt with 14Tb it was thought to be good for a while.

[frankr2994]

Last note would be that I set the pool up on my system using windows 10 workstation pro. The server is running windows 10 pro. Workstation allows me to set it up using refs. I've done this for a few systems over the years and I haven't had anyone else contact me with any issues. I originally liked the idea of storage spaces because I could set everything up and the software raid pool could just get dropped into any windows 10 machine without issue.

[frankr2994]

Ok I don't have access to the server at this moment but I think I know what happened. I think it was setup thin provisioned and that the unused space doesn't zero back out and keeps adding up. Does anyone know how to revert this or are we going to have to start over

[frankr2994]

If anyone cares if you create a storage space using win pro or server w/e doesn't matter and it's thin provisioned it can and will "use" more than the available capacity. If this happens it seems there is nothing to do other than start over. The only way for this not to happen is to set an optimization schedule up with power shell so it can zero back out the un used space. No way for that to work after the capacity is over full. This server is going to have the pool re done once our off-site backup arrives. The new pool is going to get setup on my server 2016 data center machine. Going for fixed provisioning mirrored refs. I'm hoping this is going to be our answer for our ignorance of monitoring the server. Originally the only item that was set in place to notify us of a problem was crystal disk info to alert us with any drive problems. Obviously crystal disk thinks everything is fine right now.