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Ask Slashdot: Smarter Disk Space Monitoring In the Age of Cheap Storage?
relliker writes In the olden days, when monitoring a file system of a few 100 MB, we would be alerted when it topped 90% or more, with 95% a lot of times considered quite critical. Today, however, with a lot of file systems in the Terabyte range, a 90-95% full file system can still have a considerable amount of free space but we still mostly get bugged by the same alerts as in the days of yore when there really isn't a cause for immediate concern. Apart from increasing thresholds and/or starting to monitor actual free space left instead of a percentage, should it be time for monitoring systems to become a bit more intelligent by taking space usage trends and heuristics into account too and only warn about critical usage when projected thresholds are exceeded? I'd like my system to warn me with something like, 'Hey!, you'll be running out of space in a couple of months if you go on like this!' Or is this already the norm and I'm still living in a digital cave? What do you use, on what operating system?
Percentages still make sense. Much more sense than absolute numbers.
It's possible that the alarm thresholds we've chosen might be tweaked, but percentages are still the way to go.
If you don't understand why we use percentages in the first place, you probably shouldn't be working in IT.
I typically partition the drive into two logical drives. The inner partitions with awful performance are where my media goes (movies, music, photos). The performance falloff is non-linear. Also, performance degradation over time is worse for the inner tracks, so inner tracks are where you put data that is more or less static, or at least written sequentially.
I'll bet that's not true...
Seems to me that the stuff I work on keeps getting bigger and bigger, as does my collection of digital pictures and videos. Where I attempt to pare down what I keep, some of it stays around...
I expect that most users do the same things and thus data keeps piling up. I don't think it matters how well you are at deleting stuff you don't need anymore.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
You're living in a digital cave IMHO.
:).
Don't worry, I was too until recently...
Always mucked with fast external storage as the "main" solution -- firewire, thunderbolt, etc. This system is the main and had a few externals hooked up, that system had another, another over there for something else. It was a mess all around. How to back it all up??
Gave them all away -- bought a Synology
Then bought another (back it up
180-200M/sec throughput is the norm. On the network. Beats out most external drives I've ever come across. Everything ties into / backs up to the array. Home and work now too.
I use everything but Microsoft products. They're shit.
My filesystem is 60T w/ under 10T used today. I'll consider plugging in more drives or changing them out in the Synology somewhere between 2017 and 2020...
I delete things when I'm done using them
1) Many of my things I either desire to use for many years to come (a video download I paid for), or am required to keep to cover my ass (taxes, logs, most data at work due to policies, etc)
2a) The cost of more storage space is almost always less than the cost of the time to clean up files that could be deleted. In the context of work this does depend heavily on exactly who made the data and their rate of pay / work load - but I've noted the higher up execs and managers tend to be the worst hoarders as well as of course the highest rates of pay. Most of the lower techs on the shop floor don't even have access above read-only to the network storage here, though that is far from universal everywhere.
2b) Yes there are other people whos time is not as expensive, but no one other than the datas owner/creator can know 100% what needs to stay vs what can go (and sometimes even the owner/creator chooses wrong.)
3) After deleting/archiving data, the chances of you needing it in the future are typically higher to much higher than the chances you are really done with it.
4) For the small number of times you really are done with it (like, totally and fur sure), the amount of data that gets deleted is generally such a small percentage of the whole that, while still a good thing to do, doesn't really help much with the problem at hand - freeing up a lot of space for future needs.
I never run out of disk space.
You either have too much free storage space, not enough data, or possibly both :P