Hi Folks, I am wondering what the current recommendations are in terms of how much disk space to leave free on your NAS unit. I'm sure the answer is 'it depends' so to give one specific scenario that I personally have at the moment:
I have a NV+ V2 that has 4* 3TB drives in Xraid2 so that's 8.1TB total space, and it reports 1.7TB free (which says 79% full and I seem to recall I did recently get a message in the logs warning me 'Volume C is approaching capacity 80% used'). The wife and I are professional photographers and this NAS has nothing but photos on it. So lots of smallish files (>700,000) I did run into the previous 'issue' of tremendous speed slowdown when the NAS started to fill up, which IIRC seemed to eventually turn out to be an issue with the EXT file system running out of space (RAM?) when it needed to work out where to copy new data, however updating to 5.3.8 when it finally came out and doing a factory reset before copying the data back seemed to solve it (for me anyway). However I worryingly found a fairly recent followup post at the end of this thread http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=21&t=69560&start=30 which seems to indicate that its possible to run into the same or similar issue when even more data is added.
At this moment, I have another fresh NV+ V2 ready to go to accept new 2014 data if needed, and I was thinking of archiving the older unit, however its .... er ... irksome to know there is around 1.7TB left, and this would be 'wasted' as is. So I'm tempted to either keep adding to the data for a little while longer, or use the space and copy some additional data which would be handy to also archive/backup, however as the NAS seems to be working fine at the moment, while it would spend most of its remaining life off, only to be plugged in on occasion in case we need to retrieve old data, I don't want to push it over the edge so to speak, and fill it so much that I start to run into issues. So anyone got any advice on how much I could fill it? or should I quit while I'm ahead and all is well @ the 80% full mark?
Generally I think 80% to 85% is a good rule of thumb for "full". Much above that, and even ext will begin to fragment, and performance suffers.
Though I would be thinking about archiving the oldest pictures to external drives (perhaps making 2 or 3 copies if you want to protect access). Then use both NAS, using one to back up the other.
