Minimum free space not being honored

[flimflamman]

I have share that has minimum free drive space set to 60GB (that's also how i have it set in the settings) but I have a couple drives that only have like 5GB of free space. There's only one share being used on each of these drives so I'm not sure why this is happening. Any suggestions?

[garycase]

Minimum free space means not to START a copy to a drive that doesn't have that much space left.

 

Once a copy starts, however, it will finish.  For example, suppose there's 70GB free, and you copy a 65GB file to the drive ... the copy will be allowed, since the drive has more than 60GB free; but after it's done there will only be 5GB left on the drive.  It will not, of course, allow another copy to that drive, since it no longer meets the min free requirement.

 

[flimflamman]

oh ok gotcha. I guess in my mind I thought it might be better for the drive not to be filled to the brim for performance reasons. obviously that thought isn't founded on anything specific.

[garycase]

There's no performance issue with a full drive -- reads aren't impacted; and if it's full there won't be any writes to it 

 

The reason you should set a "minimum free space" value is so a copy won't be started to the drive if the file won't fit -- so you should basically set min free to the size of the largest file you might ever copy.  UnRAID has no way to knowing what size a file is that you're copying to it -- so if you didn't have a min free set a copy could fail because there wasn't enough space on the drive.

 

[trurl]

Also, Split Level takes precedence, so if your split level says certain files belong together, then they will get written to the same disk regardless of the Minimum Free setting.