The 20tb drive was working fine as an SMB share thru the Slate until I hooked it up to my laptop (Windows 10 22H2) and reformatted it to get rid of a Nextcloud glitch and copy a bunch of files over USB 3. The drive is working fine when hooked directly to a computer.
But now when I hook it to the Slate via a powered hub with four other external drives (the 20tb worked fine over SMB before), the 20tb shows in the Disk Management section under Network Storage (although not accurately reporting the space available - it's got over 15tb free). The other drives' free space appears to be reported accurately, and are successfully shared.
This was working fine before, so what gives? Drive permissions issue? It must have something to do with its reformatting, but I did nothing unusual for that - just the default Windows settings (NTFS).
Samba is installed as confirmed over SSH:
root@GL-A1300:~# opkg list-installed | grep samba
samba4-libs - 4.14.12-2
samba4-server - 4.14.12-2
samba4-utils - 4.14.12-2
Here's how things look under the OpenWRT interface:
From what I've been reading, the Slate has a 32-bit processor, which limits NTFS volume sizes.
I have ntfs-3g installed and updated on the router, and it sees & writes to my 8tb volume with no problem. But it seems to choke on a 20tb NTFS volume.
Guess I'll be reformatting as exFAT!
My guess after learning this is that the drive was formatted as exFAT out of the box (I never looked to see), which is why it worked initially. My reformatting to NTFS has to be what hosed its mountability by the Slate.
Will update this thread after copyover of files, reformat to exFAT, and copyback (probably take 12 hours) to let y'all know how it goes.
You're welcome, but not so fast - while exFAT solved the issue from a technical standpoint, it caused my space on disk to double with Windows setting the minimum block size to 8 megabytes!
Even when I reformatted it to have a 2mb block size (apparently the minimum Windows will recognize on an exFAT volume) the folder bloat was unacceptable.
So in the end, I simply split the drive up into three NTFS partitions (6, 6, and 7 tb) and they're all being recognized by the Slate just fine. Dunno why I wasn't smart enough to think of that sooner, but my wife did and suggested it, thank goodness.
I did try ext4, but there were no reliable ways to do that from ubuntu command line with Powershell and WLS in Windows - it wouldn't even see the drive. Various formatting tools for Windows didn't work at all.
So I booted the machine into an Ubuntu USB I made today with the most recent version, plugged the drive in, formatted it as ext4, took it over to the Slate and hooked it up. It saw the drive, had the wrong reported size though, and wouldn't let it be shared over SMB.
grr. Oh, well. I ended up using smaller NTFS partitions. Thank you for all your suggestions, though!
