Reclaiming disk space for USB storage - HDD

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Bishop27

Member
Jul 3, 2024
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Hello all,
I have a situation I could use some assistance with, I have a usb storage box that has 3 hard drive inside that totals 6TB the file system is set to ext4. Well now its 98% full so I've decided to remove files from the disk and reclaim that space. This usb storage box is mounted to a LXC and I've tried using fstrim -a from within the LXC with no success.

/dev/sdg2 5.5T 5.4T 75G 99% /media/MEDIA-STACK

Thanks in advance.
 
Bishop27 said:
I've tried using fstrim -a from within the LXC with no success.
Click to expand...
On an unprivileged CT, you won't be able to run fstrim AFAIK. However (& depending on how you've mounted that disk inside the CT) you could possibly try pct fstrim <ctid> from the host node as shown here:
pct fstrim <vmid> [OPTIONS]

Run fstrim on a chosen CT and its mountpoints, except bind or read-only mountpoints.
Click to expand...
 
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I've tried running the above command from the host with no success. This is the disk from which I've removed some data (old files) and want to reclaim the space :
sdg 8:96 0 5.5T 0 disk
├─sdg1 8:97 0 200M 0 part
└─sdg2 8:98 0 5.5T 0 part /media/MEDIA-STACK
 
/media/MEDIA-STACK is a bind mount. pct fstrim does not apply here. I'm curious why you picked exfat.
Please try this on the node to see what the space is used by
Bash: 
apt install gdu
gdu /media/MEDIA-STACK
 
AFAIK this should normally work for any mounted FSs on the host:

1. Shutdown all VMs & CTs which use the /media/MEDIA-STACK mount, so all MEDIA-STACK storage devices. This may not be absolutely necessary.
2. Run fstrim -av on the host, which should work for ALL its mounted FSs.
3. Or you could just run fstrim -v /media/MEDIA-STACK for that mount.

You may want to check that all volumes within PVE that use the MEDIA-STACK storage have discard enabled.


However in your OP you state that the USB enclosure has 3 hard disks that total 6TB, so 3 things stand out here:

  • Firstly are these hard disks & not SSD's. They may not support trim.
  • Secondly there must be some HW raid controller in that box for the 3 disks. Does this support trim commands - IDK.
  • Trim over USB in general does not always function - usually being dependent on the underlying bus being used. See here for example.
 
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