To free the physical storage space it is necessary for the virtual disk to both release the unused sectors (thru TRIM and UNMAP commands) to the underlying storage and for the physical storage to be released and possibly defragmented to consolidate the still used storage to a single contiguous block. Eventually the virtual disk will consume the entirety of the allocated space on the physical storage regardless of how much storage is actually used on the virtual disk. Just because you are only using 200MB doesn’t mean that 50GB of the “freed space” doesn’t still contain data. Think about how a deleted file can actually be recovered by scanning a disk. This is because sections of the physical storage have been allocated to the virtual disk, even if the storage on the virtual disk has been erased. However, as a result of the thinly provisioned disk, the underlying physical storage needed will only grow and never shrink. In this way, you can over provision thinly provisioned disks so that you can actually have several virtual disks that are, in total, larger than the physically available storage. When you begin adding data to the virtual disk, the underlying physical storage will increase in usage to grow with the storage used on the virtual disk.

In the second image, you show only 200MB used of a virtual volume that was carved out of the available physical storage pool.Ī 3.62TB thinly provisioned virtual disk will only use a small amount of the underlying physical storage.

In the first image, you show a storage pool usage of nearly 50GB, which represents the total physical space used on the underlying hardware. But what this looks like to me is a misinterpretation of drive space usage on a virtual disk, commonly associated with “thin provisioning.” I don’t have a lot of experience with Storage Spaces.

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