Large 'size on disk' size

My Cloud OS 3 Personal & Network Attached Storage My Cloud
1

Hi all,

I have a folder with quite a bit of photos/txt/whatnots, usually very small size.
On my D drive, the file size is roughly the same as the size on disk, but when copied to mycloud the required size on disk becomes extremely large.
I know about the older file system needing more space on file properties, but as far as i know mycloud should be NTFS.
Are there different NTFS systems? If so, can i convert it like back in the day we do for fat32 to ntfs?

Any insight is appreciated, thanks!

2

The My Cloud’s user storage partition is not NTFS, it is EXT4. It would appear Windows is reading the size on disk incorrectly of the Share on the My Cloud. If you do an internet search (like with Google) for “windows size on disk wrong nas” you’ll see this issue affects many NAS devices other than the My Cloud. It is apparently an issue with SMB which is used by many NAS devices.

3

According to properties, the wd my cloud is NTFS.
If it is simply reading it incorrectly, it should still only take up roughly 4.40 GB in my case, instead of 20 GB right?

4

If one uses SSH to access their My Cloud and issues the parted -l command from the command line they’ll see that even though Windows may report the My Cloud as NTFS (probably due to Samba), the file system for the partition containing the user data is actually EXT4.

For example on a 1T My Cloud running v4.x firmware, parted -l returns the following. Partition #4 is the user data storage partition that contains the Shares. Note how it says EXT4 for the File System.

As to the “size on disk” issue that appears to be a Samba issue or bug as it apparently affects other NAS manufactures.

https://community.netgear.com/t5/Using-your-ReadyNAS/Size-of-files-folders-vs-quot-size-on-disk-quot-MASSIVELY/td-p/856445

http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?t=78367

5

The MyCloud isn’t a simple internal or USB HDD. It is a network attached storage device. It is a linux computer with a hard disk attached. The hard disk is formatted with the ext4 file system, commonly used by linux systems. You do not see this file system directly. It provides a file server function, using one of a number of file server protocols: SMB, NFS, AFP.

Essentially, windows is telling you what disk format it is presenting the mapped drive as, not the actual format used by the NAS (as said, you never see the actual disk format, because you access it indirectly).

6

I think i understand, so is there a fix to this issue?
I am guessing changing the system format is out of question since its linux

Thanks