WD My Book 3Tb

P

Paul Dixon

I calculated that 3Tbytes should be ample to back up my files, but was a little shocked to see the indicators in Windows explorer showing red with only a little over 100Bytes free.
I had copied about 1TB from another source followed by about 850GBytes from my PC, which I copied over by drag and drop. The statistics for that data are shown below.

size: 797 GB (856,701,527,078 bytes)
size on disk: 1.83 TB ( 2,012,924,084,224 bytes)

1,325,717 files 34,186 folders

The packing on the first set was quite good, less than 1% more on disk than the size.
I tried experiments with smaller blocks from this data set and got some cases that were significantly worse.
What is going wrong here. Is it something I have done. Is it the way the disk is formatted.
Some guidance would be appreciated because I don't think this is going to meet my needs if I can't get better size on disk.
 
Get into the DiskMgr

The upper panel is a summary and shows:
volume, Layout, Type, File System, Status​

The lower panel enumerates the devices and the Boot device is always Disk 0
For each Partition, the Label is shown

For example my boot disk is a 500GB, but under the Disk 0 notation, shows 465.76GB usable - - that's 93% of the rated size.
As you found out, the Block size impacts the efficiency; using large sizes will produce wasted space in the clusters when small files dominate you data.

That said, under File System, do you see FAT or NTFS for the 3tb device? My guess is Fat and that would be the issue.
If you need to be compatible with Mac and/or Linux, then leave it alone. Otherwise, reformat as NTFS as that is far more efficient and gives ACL (access control lists) to the data.
 
Thanks for the reply. The disk is formatted as exFAT.
To start, I have just used it to back up my data, but longer term, I had planned to use it as part of a Raspberry Pi based network storage device. So it seems like I can't simply unplug from windows and into the pi.
So I will have to review my longer term options.
But at least I know the problem as it stands.
 
PI looks to be a platform to build whatever. The Pi will apparently connect to Mac & PCs and run in a virtual environment on either .

Most NAS systems boot Linux internally and thus run EXT2 file systems and Linux supports exFat like everyone else.

However, the PI appears to have it's own proprietary OS. If the goal is educational - - then go for it. Otherwise I would just buy a dedicated NAS device.

Quick outline on Shared External Storage:
  1. the obvious NAS controller & storage which has an IP address, is independent from all other systems, yet accessible by all. This form can use RAID and sometimes support hot-swapping.
  2. a USB storage device attached to a primary system which has the root folder on the device Shared, <everyone> R/W.
(2) works as long as the primary system is running AND all systems can tolerate the filesystem on that volume; RAID can not be supported.
 
BTW; the WD 3-4 TB units have a bad MTBF history - - hopefully that has been corrected. This did influence my decision to get a 2TB device for my DVR expansion storage.
 
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