Hello,

 

I'm trying to set the allocation method for my user shares and need to know what the format is for the "min free space" parameter? The format is not described in the WIKI.

 

For insatnce, if I want my min free space to be 30GB do I enter "30" or 30GB" 0r "3000000000"?

 

Thanks!

 

Hello,

 

I'm trying to set the allocation method for my user shares and need to know what the format is for the "min free space" parameter? The format is not described in the WIKI.

 

For insatnce, if I want my min free space to be 30GB do I enter "30" or 30GB" 0r "3000000000"?

 

Thanks!

 

None of the above...

 

See release notes: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=3760.0

and here: http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=4590.0

 

I think 30GB would therefore be 3000000

I trying to think of a reason why you want to keep free space. Windows starts acting weird when a disk is almost full, but I don't know if the same happens on Linux. I guess if you wanted to always have "working" space for like encoding videos...I guess.

According to the link provided, user Limetech says:

 

"Units are 1024-byte blocks.  So if you set Min free space to 1000 that would be

1000 x 1024 = 1,024,000 bytes. (1MB roughly)"

=================================================

 

Therefore by my calculations, 1GB = 1024MB (1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes)

 

and...

 

30GB = 30 x 1GB = 30 x (1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes) = 32 212 254 720

 

But since the min free space is in 1024 byte blocks we divide by 1024 and get 32212254720/1024 = 31457280

I trying to think of a reason why you want to keep free space. Windows starts acting weird when a disk is almost full, but I don't know if the same happens on Linux. I guess if you wanted to always have "working" space for like encoding videos...I guess.

 

The reason to "reserve" free space on a drive is to prevent errors when writing large files to the user shares.  If you were copying a 4G file out to the share and the system doesn't allocate the space all at once the copy could fail after a long wait.  If you set the minimum to 5G, you'd know that writing a 4G file to that disk will fit (leaving 1G) but the next file regardless of size would be written to another drive (assuming it was allowed to split directories).

 

Windows normally does not allocate all the space for a file but appends to the file having it grow in size until the copy is finished.

Ok, that makes sense. I thought if you tried to copy a file larger than what was available, unRaid would just fail right away. Instead of having to do all these calculations, adding a simple drop down to choose between KB, MB, or GB would be a nice feature.

The reason to "reserve" free space on a drive is to prevent errors when writing large files to the user shares.  If you were copying a 4G file out to the share and the system doesn't allocate the space all at once the copy could fail after a long wait.  If you set the minimum to 5G, you'd know that writing a 4G file to that disk will fit (leaving 1G) but the next file regardless of size would be written to another drive (assuming it was allowed to split directories).

 

Windows normally does not allocate all the space for a file but appends to the file having it grow in size until the copy is finished.

 

I thought if you tried to copy a file larger than what was available, unRaid would just fail right away.

 

It does does fail right away. However, the file the Windows client is copying block by block (a few K per block), so there is no way for unRAID (Linux/Samba) to know the final size of the file you're trying to copy, as a few K is typically smaller than the free space on the drive. This is purely a client-side issue. unRAID works around this issue with the reserve free space setting.

The easiest 'fix' for now is for Tom to change the web page to say "Min free space (KB) :" instead of "Min free space :".

I guess my setting of "20" probably wasn't enough. I thought it was GB.

 

Time to increase that number a bit.

By the way, the reason I was CONSIDERING such large free space amount was to accommodate large Blu-Ray movie or MKV files.

 

Sorry to resurrect my own OLD thread.