The storage areas were misused with inaccurate capacity.
The storage areas were misused with inaccurate capacity.
This situation has been puzzling me lately, often appearing online without a clear solution. A friend had their server set up with a Plex client last year. I created a mirrored refs storage pool using four drives—two 6GB and two 8GB—with a total pool size of 24GB. However, the actual storage is around 14GB after accounting for provisioning. The system shows low storage, yet all drives are nearly full at 99.99%. Only about 6.78GB of space is used. When I tried to run an optimization via PowerShell, it reported the operation couldn’t proceed because the volume was full. It’s been stable for a year, so this isn’t a setup issue. Since the server runs remotely, I can’t pinpoint the exact day it occurred. We had email alerts for drive problems, which helped us assume everything was fine.
It likely involves backups, snapshots, or duplication features. The best option is to disable them and remove older files manually.
It's not straightforward but I have an image from when this was installed in March last year. It displays ample free space around 2000Gb. Films and shows use efficient compression, so they don't consume much storage and the archive isn't massive. It took about three years to accumulate roughly 5Tb, and after the system was upgraded to 14Tb it seemed sufficient for some time.
The final point is that I installed the pool on my system using Windows 10 Workstation Pro. The server runs Windows 10 Pro, and the workstation lets me configure it via references. I've done this on several machines before and haven't received any complaints from others. I initially favored storage spaces since they let everything be set up and the software RAID pool could be placed seamlessly on any Windows 10 machine.
You're unsure about the current state of the server setup. It seems the unused space isn't being cleared properly, which could affect performance. There might be ways to fix this issue, but it may require some technical adjustments. If you need a definitive solution, checking with the support team or reviewing the configuration settings would be helpful. Starting over might be an option if the problem persists.
Someone might wonder if using Win Pro or a thin provisioned server can actually utilize more space than it has. If this occurs, it may mean you need to restart everything. The best solution is to create an optimization plan with PowerShell so the system can reclaim unused areas. Once capacity fills up, fixing this won't be possible. This server will be replaced by a new pool once our off-site backup arrives. The updated pool will be installed on my 2016 data center machine. I’m opting for mirrored replicas to ensure stability. Previously, the only warning we had was about crystal disk information alerting us of drive issues, but it didn’t provide much help.