What happens when a drive fills up completely?


Recommended Posts

I have just been noticing that unRAID will get extremely slow when you try to add files to drives that have less than about 15GB free.  I have a 10 drive array (all 2TB drives) and over the last few months had been running low on space, during this time Windows 7 would take a long time "discovering files" when attempting to copy a new file to the array.  As the free space dropped to about the 12GB point it was eventually failing with a network error (after several minutes of waiting for the copy to start).  Nothing was reported in the unRAID syslog.  When I went to the unRAID console and tried a few copies I there I also encountered long delays - and commands that never finished.

 

Yesterday, as an experiment, I removed about 50GB from one of the drives and the slow copying problem went away.  This suggests to me that there is some sort of low disk space error condition that is getting masked at some level in the system and the result is a command that never completes (hence the network time out).

 

In the past few years I've always popped in a new drive long before this happened, but this year I was waiting for the 5.0 release version so I could transition to 4TB drives and ran out of space before the release happened.  So now I am upgrading to 5.0rc11 and preclearing a couple of new 4TB drives which I will replace my parity drive and one of the 2TB drives with to make space.

 

Regards,

 

Stephen

Link to comment

There is a known issue with ReaiserFS file systems (on all systems, not just unRAID) in that they start slowing down significantly for adding new files as they get very full.    I expect this is what you are seeing?

 

That could well be the cause. It's a good thing the problem seems to go away just by freeing up some space.

 

Stephen

Link to comment

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.