RAID Block size causing too much disk usage

[AdrianW 1052]

I've only just recently noticed that even the smallest files on my NAS are taking 256MB of space - this adds up to many, many gigabytes of wasted space.

 

I'm sure this has something to do with the block size that is being used. I have a single volume consisting of 8 x 2TB drives in Raid 6 using EXT4.

 

I can't remember if there was even a block size option when I set up the volume. 256MB seems way too large.

 

Most of that data on the NAS is obviously video, but with all the associated metadata and images taking up 256MB each, I'm filling it up far quicker than I should be.

 

Here's an example: I ripped and encoded the Freaks and Geeks DVDs and the main series folder contains a total of 84 files (18 video files, 46 images, 19 xml files and 1 mp3) - the total size is 9.48 GB but the size on disk is 30.0 GB ! 

 

I just performed a search for "backdrop2", "backdrop3", etc in one of my folders just to see how much data I could save my deleting these additional (nice to have) backdrops - I found 167 files which would give me back 41.7 GB !

 

(I wonder if this is actually just Windows reporting the wrong size on disk for an EXT4 volume over Samba)

Edited February 28, 2014 by AdrianW

[AdrianW 1052]

This has to be a Windows issue - I just displayed the properties for my main Video folder on my NAS, (this is 8 x 2TB Raid 6 - so max space is approx 12 TB).

 

Windows reports Size: 9.49 TB and Size on disk: 32.2 TB 

 

There must be some incompatibility between SMB and Windows 8. 

 

I found this post on the technet forums which talks about the same thing.