Tag Archives: hdd

Hard Drive Full?

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KB ID 0000012

Problem

The fact that I’m going back to re-write article 0000012, should tell you this is an omnipresent problem! Either very suddenly, or slowly over time you have a drive or a volume that’s full to bursting point. These days with laptops which have smaller SSD drives it’s a common problem.

I’ve seen literally hundreds of post in forums, most of them are answered with ‘Use WinDirStat’, or ‘Use TreeSize’. Techies seem to be a fan of one or the other, and stick with the tool that’s served them best.

What If There’s No Room To Install Either Of these?

Good point, then you can use PowerShell, I’ll cover that below also. Well I said everyone has a favourite solution, here’s mine,

WinDirStat

My weapon of choice, install it and give it the drive you want to analyse;

When it’s finished, you will see something like this;

So you get a graphical representation of the drive, and you can see TWO things straight away, firstly you can spot large files, click on them and it will tell you what they are. Secondly it groups ‘Types’ of files together, if you just look at folder sizes it can be misleading e.g. The ‘red’ files above are my MP3 Collection, I know that folder is massive and I expect it to have a lot of stuff in it. But in some cases this is great! e.g. If your IIS server is churning out logs and theres a folder with millions of them in it, you will spot it straight away.

Why Do I Prefer This? I prefer the graphical front end, I can send a screen shot to client, and they understand what’s happening, and it’s always been free. (There is a free version of TreeSize in fairness). I just like this one.

TreeSize

Once you’ve installed simply select the drive in question,

You can then drill down folders which are sized based on usage. One thing I do like about TreeSize is, it knows the difference between file size and actual size, and you can swap views accordingly. But I’ve included it here so every-time I post this article link in a forum, you can see both and make your own mind up.

PowerShell

This is really a PowerShell version of using the same approach TreeSize uses. You need a PowerShell plugin called PSFolderSize, then simply navigate to the the drive in question and run Get-FolderSize.

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Install-Module PSFoldersize
cd {Drive-Letter}:
Get-FolderSize

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You can then drill down {cd folder-name} one at a time repeating the same command.

 

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vSphere: Presenting Physical Disks to a VM

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KB ID 0001563

Problem

I’m doing some work presenting StarWind vSAN into VMware ESX. Because we also want ‘disk tiering’ it has to be ran from Microsoft Windows with Storage Spaces*. To do that I needed to present the physical disks in the ESX hosts, (HP DL380 Gen 10s) to the Windows Virtual Machines that StarWind will be running on.

*Note: At present, ‘tiering’ cannot be done from the StarWind Linux appliance.

Solution

I approached this problem ‘assuming‘ I needed to give the VM the physical RAID controller in the physical server (of which there are two, one for the SSDs and one for the HDDs. But that’s not the case at all, I realised this when I needed to create a datastore on the host itself, and could see all the individual disks.

Shut Down, then edit the settings of the VM > ADD NEW DEVICE > RDM Disk.

Select and add each Physical disk one at a time.

With all the disks presented you can power on the virtual machine.

You will see all the disk(s) listed under the VMs summary hardware section.

The disk should be available within Windows, to add to a storage pool.

Note: If some of the drives cannot be added, see the following article;

Windows Disks ‘CanPool’ set False?

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