Seedbox Storage Quota

Understanding Your Storage Quota

When using a seedbox, it's important to understand your storage quota. This guide will help you understand how to check your quota and what it means.

Your Quota Meter

The quota meter in the portal is the most accurate way to check your storage quota. It's updated regularly and reflects the actual space you have available in your seedbox.

Checking Your Quota Shell / SSH

There are several ways to check your quota:

Use the 'quota -s' command in the console.
Check the 'cat .quota' file in your home directory.

The 'df' Command

The 'df' command is a common way to check disk space in Linux. However, in our system, it may not show the correct information due to some backend processes. It does not tell about your quota neither.

File Limit and Inodes

A seedbox or storage box has two limits, and either one can stop new writes: disk space and the number of files. The file limit is derived from the disk quota: 500 files per GiB (never below 15,000) as the soft limit, and 25% more as the hard limit, so a 1 TiB quota allows 512,000 files soft and 640,000 hard. Staying above the soft limit past its grace period blocks writes just as the hard limit does.

Every file, directory and symlink uses one inode (the filesystem record that describes it), whether it holds 2 bytes or 40 GiB. Below an average of about 2 MiB per file, the file limit runs out while disk space is still free. quota -s shows both limits and current usage.

Packing a collection of tiny files into a .tar or squashfs image turns thousands of inodes into one, but never do this to files a torrent client is still seeding: archiving them breaks the torrent. The file limit scales with the disk quota, so a larger plan raises both limits together. The full formula, a table per quota size and fixes per application are in the knowledge base article How file limits are calculated.

Excessive Seeking and Wasted Space

Having a large number of small files can lead to excessive seeking by the hard drive. Seeking is the process where the hard drive's read/write head moves to the location of a file. Excessive seeking can slow down the hard drive and reduce its lifespan.

Small files can also lead to wasted space. Each file, no matter how small, takes up at least one block of storage. If the file is smaller than the block size, the remaining space in the block is wasted.

Bonus Disk Policy

Pulsed Media offers a Free Bonus Disk Policy to loyal customers. If the server has free disk space, extra quota may be assigned to you. This is done automatically by our system.

Remember, your quota meter is the most accurate way to check your storage quota. If you have any issues, don't hesitate to contact support.