Copy/move between shares is sloooooooooooow...

StephenB wrote:

You apparently missed a post further down: Skywalker wrote: ...future firmware releases will support this sort of operation via SMB2's FSCTL_SRV_COPYCHUNK command, which is for server-side copies. But I don't know which SMB clients use that command, other than Windows Server 2012. It seems to me that the web ui could also use the --reflink option. The bottom line is that it works this way for now. Netgear might be able to put in limited support for --reflink in various spots. But this is a tradeoff - the snapshots are also a feature that many users want. The ability to turn snapshots on/off on a share-by-share basis is also needed, and supporting that means that moves between shares (subvolumes) are treated as copy/delete by the file system. Some users will prefer the snapshot control, others don't care about snapshots, and would rather have the direct move.

I agree that it would be a lot simpler for Netgear to include support for the --reflink option in the GUI, particularly as they can refuse support if SSH access is enabled. As the prime purpose of a NAS is file storage and management I think this is a fairly basic request. I move files between different folders and shares on a pretty regular basis on my main machine and also a WHS server, I'd like to be able to do the same efficiently and immediately on the ReadyNAS.

I don't yet fully understand all the implications of the snapshot capability but I believe I read another thread in which a user found that his disk usage seemed too high after moving some files. It turned out that the reason was snapshot storage left over in the folder from which the files had been moved. Deleting those snapshots solved the excess usage issue.

If Netgear were to implement the "--reflink" method in the GUI for a move command and add an option to choose to either move or delete the related snapshots that would seem to solve both the above requirements you mention? As I understand it after a "--reflink" move the files would still be stored in the same physical location/blocks so the snapshots would still be relevant, just referenced from a different share?

Or am I missing a complication which makes that not possible?