WHS Space Utilization Report Descrepancy?

[TechLarry]

Either I found a bug in WHS, or there's something I don't understand here.

Here is a picture of the properties of a Music Folder I had on my desktop. The folder is a set of MP3's at 320K:

http://s32.photobucket.com/albums/d50/pictureposter/Other/?action=view&current=CorrecetDriveTally.jpg

Size: 20.2GB, Size On Disk: 20.2GB.

I copied that folder to the Music Share on WHS. Now, look at the size of the folder:

http://s32.photobucket.com/albums/d50/pictureposter/Other/?action=view&current=IncorrectDriveTally.jpg

Size: 20.2GB, Size On Disk: 11.2MB.

This folder is set for Duplication.

I need to let it sit a while to be sure, but I copied the same folder to a non-duplicated share and the sizes matched up properly.

Also, the folder copy to the duplicated Music share was excruciatingly slow. Only around 3MB/Sec and it took hours.

The copy to the non-duplicated folder ran at the normal 19 to 20 MB/Sec.

As far as the speed goes, my only guess is that if a folder is set for duplication, when a write is made to it the duplication for each file is handled at that same time by WHS and it's database is updated before it moves on to the next file. If this is the case, if you are creating a new share and are going to copy a lot of data to it, it makes sense to NOT turn on Duplication until you have populated the folder, then turn on duplication so WHS will do it in the background.

As for the store size, I don't know. There is either a bug, or WHS has a compression system for MP3's that is out of this world :)

[nessus]

You can't rely on space usage information from a client. All that means is that the disk that has the share has 11.2 MB of data on it from the share. How many other disks are in your home server?

If you have 3 disks for instance, the share can be homed on one disk, the data can be hosted with duplication on the other two, or a mix.

The ONLY way to interact with actual disk space usage on WHS with data stored with redundancy is through the WHS management interface. Your client is unaware of the redirection the server is doing on the back end, as is Explorer running on the WHS server itself.

You get the same behavior in Explorer if you deal with a directory that contains junctions or mount points, even on the local machine. Explorer doesn't have the APIs needed to report accurate information under those circumstances. It literally cannot tell the difference between a junction and a directory. You can do some really bad things with Explorer because of this if you aren't really careful with your junction target permissions...

[TechLarry]

Gotcha. Makes sense :)

I still consider this a bug though :)