5TB External Drives shrink to 560GB!!

PapaQuebec

Hi all,

Apologies in advance - this is going to be a long one....

For the last few years I've been building up a video/TV library based on 4 x Iomega Screenplay DX media players.

One unit would act as the "hub" while the other 3 2TB devices would plug into the USB host ports and be available both for playback and, over the network, for file transfer.

A few months ago I noticed that I was getting short of space on one of the units, so I replaced it with a WD Elements 3TB External HDD. - I should point out that I couldn't put the HDD from the WD into the Iomega unit as it's firmware wont recognise GPT partitions. I copied all the data to the new drive and all was well. The 3TB was visible as 2.72TB over the network

Timeshift forward a few months and I decided I really needed to upgrade all the storage except the unit used as the hub - the one connected to the TV.

I bought two 5TB WD Elements drives, transferred all the data (18 hours) and connected to the hub unit - bingo! All my files staring back at me over the network - 4.5TB per drive.

Thanks for your patience.....

Here is my problem.

The cooling fan failed in the "hub" unit, and, while I wait for a replacement from eBay, I switched over to one of the units that had been used as "slaves".

This meant I had to go through the network set-up procedure again but, what the heck, it's only a few minutes work.

However, once I remapped the drives the externals now only show up as 561GB - and full to the brim. I disconnected from the Screenplay and connected directly to a USB 3.0 port on my PC - still 561GB!!

Disk management shows the drives to be their correct 4.56TB with 561GB used space. As does Paragon Partition Manager.

Has anyone any idea how I can get my PC and the Media player to see the full capacity of the disks without formatting or messing with partition tables, and getting access to the data?

The data on the disks ( and it hasn't gone anywhere) too literally years to assemble

Many thanks

ED E

Why do you keep buying more units? Really this is a very poor solution, like using a compute cluster of raspberry pi instead of an i7 desktop.

Do they mount ok in windows exporer?

PapaQuebec

ED E wrote: »

Why do you keep buying more units? Really this is a very poor solution, like using a compute cluster of raspberry pi instead of an i7 desktop.

Do they mount ok in windows exporer?

I buy more units because I cant fit 3TB of data on a 2TB drive!

The drives mount fine in explorer, but show capacities of only 561GB.

In disk management they show as 4.54TB.

In Paragon Hard Disk Manager they show as 4.54TB with 561GB used.

They all show the content that is supposedly on them, but many of the files have a 0Kb filesize.

ED E

There are multi bay NASs for that very reason.

Iomega appear to use their own drive pooling of some sort, you'll need to onto their support team and find out if it has method of rebuilding whatever metadata it uses.

PapaQuebec

ED E wrote: »

There are multi bay NASs for that very reason.

Iomega appear to use their own drive pooling of some sort, you'll need to onto their support team and find out if it has method of rebuilding whatever metadata it uses.

Frankly, I don't think you have the faintest idea of what I'm talking about.

ED E

The Iomega units are doing... wait who am I kidding, you may be better off on reddit.