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Ask Slashdot: Smarter Disk Space Monitoring In the Age of Cheap Storage?

Posted by timothy on from the percentages-matter-too-though dept.

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?

4 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. I delete things when I'm done using them by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    I never run out of disk space.

  2. Re:Performance issues? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, ext4 strives to scatter files around disk to avoid fragmentation. Once the disk begins to approach full, it has to use even smaller and smaller holes to place data into, which causes some fragmentation.

  3. We have more but we USE more. by pla · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    When we had drives in the 100s of MB range, we used a few MB at a time. Now that we have drives in the multi-TB range, we tend to use tens of GB at a time. In my experiences, a 90 percent full drive has as much time left before running out as it did a decade ago.

    Perhaps more importantly, running at 90% of capacity kills your performance if you still use spinning glass platters as your primary storage medium (not so much when talking about a SAN of SSDs). In general, when you hit 90% full, you have problems other than just how long you can last before reaching 100%.

  4. Re:Bigger question by Bigbutt · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's a configuration option when you newfs a file system. Man newfs or mkfs.

    [John]

    --
    Shit better not happen!