Question on "Other": "Unduplicated: 250gb Other: 246gb"

[Paddopad]

Hello,

 I've read the post explaining what is stored under "other", though when I started a pool, is it normal after adding some data to the pool drive for unduplicated to be around 250 as is other?

Some time later, unduplicated is at 1.78 tb and other is still 246gb.

Is this space necessary for drivepool functioning or perhaps something else? Will it change? Though it's 1% of the pool, it's quite a bit of space.

Thanks.

[Shane]

If your "Other" data seems large, check the "$RECYCLE.BIN" system folders of the disks; sometimes they don't empty via the Recycle Bin icon but you can safely manually delete their contents (or even the folder itself; Windows will recreate it when it needs it).

For example, on a 39.1 TB pool I'm looking at right now "Other" is at 150.2 GB while "Duplicated" is at 30.1 TB and "Unduplicated" is at 1.30 MB; after manually deleting everything in the recycle bins on the pool disks "Other" is now 10.7 GB.

Another possibility is that it could be due to large amounts of metadata and/or slack space, which accumulates for example due to having a very large number of files.

[Paddopad]

Thank you.

There are essentially no recycled items, and though most of the data at the moment is images (around 4 tb of family photos), it seems odd that when I initially checked it when copying over it was

 

Unduplicated 350gb

Other : 250gb

 

And now it is:

Unduplicated: 3.12 tb

Other : 247 gb

 

If the amount of images/small files has increased dramatically and Other is due to overhead/slack space, shouldn't that increase as well?

 

Can we see what constitutes Other in the pool?

 

Thanks a lot.

[Shane]

If it's mostly photos I would guess your Other is too high to just be overhead/slack.

I would suggest trying a measuring program such as TreeSizeFree or WinDirStat (either run as Administrator) on the disks that form the pool to see where the Other is lurking.

[Paddopad]

That's a good idea, though what would I be looking for that would mean files are under Other? Can't see anything obvious, and Other isn't increasing as the pool is being populated with files:

 

 

Thanks for any advice!

[Shane]

Instead of using WinDirStat to look in E: (your pool drive) try looking at R: to Z: (the disks that form it). Each of them will have their own $RECYCLE.BIN folder that is separate to the pool (and thus part of Other).

[Paddopad]

Ah, thank you!

Doing this, I can't see where the (collected Other) 250gb could be:

Other has increased to 255gb (and I think started at around 250gb from the beginning) whilst unduplicated is currently at 7.41 TB:

 

 

Thanks.

 

 

[Shane]

Yeah, that would seem to rule out sysvol and recycle. And I can see there isn't much difference between the Logical and Physical sizes (slack space).

There's also the possibility that the Other needs to be remeasured (e.g. if the pool has been seeded via copying directly into poolparts) which you could manually trigger via the DrivePool GUI -> Manage Pool -> Re-measure...

@Christopher (Drashna) is there a way to get DrivePool to show a breakdown of Other? I tried increasing the File Size Tracking, Pool Metrics, Pool Part Metrics and Pool Statistics details in the Service Log to Verbose for a Re-measure but it still only displayed the PoolPart file sizes for the various duplication levels, so I'm wondering if it just does something simple like "Other = Total of Disk Used Space Sizes - Total of PoolPart File Sizes"?

[Paddopad]

I remeasured and Other has increased to 301gb (it was around 250gb prior)

Is there a way to reduce it?

[Shane]

I'm about out of ideas. Other is basically "not DrivePool's monkeys" and from the screenshots I can't see what could be causing it. The disks are just normally formatted NTFS, default values e.g. 4k cluster size allocation, yes?

[Paddopad]

They're ReFS, actually, however I'm thinking of restarting in NTFS to use snapraid.

[Paddopad]

Decided to reformat all drives as NTFS.

With 0 files in the pooled drive, Other is 2.11 GB.

[Shane]

Looking forward to seeing the difference if any as the pool is refilled. 

[Paddopad]

Do you know why Other would be 2 gb with no data on the drive?

I'm watching a video on how to setup snapraid with drivepool (below) and his system at that point had

 

Unduplicated 40 gb

Other 207 mb

 

Why would his system have a smaller Other size than my system with no data on the pooled drive?

 

Uploaded some data:

 

[Shane]

My guess is because he only had two disks in his pool and those disks were only 233 GB each in size, while you've got nine disks and those are 2.73 TB each in size. Larger disks can mean more Other even when empty.

I can see you're using a bunch of 2.73 TB drives so I've grabbed one of mine, formatted it and made a pool of 1 disk; Other is 240 MB. Nine times that is about what you're seeing on yours.

[Paddopad]

Thanks! Was just wondering if it was expected.

[Paddopad]

Is 10gb for Other about normal?

 

[Shane]

I'd say so.