Deleting Large Files Extremely Slow

Drobo - End of Sale Drobo FS
1

I basically have transferred all my files to the drobo-fs.

I have a folder with large files, and when I delete at least one large file it takes a while. On a Windows or a Linux “Windows Share” deletion is instantaneous.

But from my Drobo-FS “Windows Share” it takes far too long. I deleted a folder of ISOs and it took approx 4 minutes. That is ridiculous.

Can I be told what is going on. It sometimes freezes explorer.exe which in turn freezes Firefox. Meaning I can’t really use my desktop, lots of pauses here and there.

I used ssh to login to my drobo. I went to the directory with files I wish to delete and use the linux rm command. Even that takes a while.

Why is delete so slow? Is there an answer?

2

That largely depends on file system used.

I know that Linux EXT3 file system is very slow for large file deletion, because every cluster has to be individually marked as free (no range deletion options).
Divide the size of your large file to size of one cluster (probably 4KiB) and you get approximate count of file system related operations…

3

Filesystem? I am using the Drobo-FS it has its own filesystem doesn’t it?

4

The Drobo FS is EXT3.

5

Thanks Jennifer.

Still it is still interesting and frustrating that it takes so long to delete. I don’t think it is the speed of the drobo-fs CPU and RAM that is the problem.

Oh Well I hope that an update solves this.

Before I bought the drobo-fs I had a Linux software RAID5 setup and it was fast. But I guess the drobo-fs can remain a secondary backup which is unfortunate.