Either a desktop environment or install on CentOS?

Installation
1

Hi folks,

I live in a household of laptops, all 4+ years old and USB 2.0
I have a 6TB drive, I cannot get this to show more that 931 GB on a USB drive, on the laptops, even under Linux, so the only way I can use this disk is over the network.

I could use a different distro to act as a NAS, but they either are a nightmare to run a single disk, or packages under Debian, but Rockstor just does it for me (besides the nag every time I log in on the webUI :confused: )

Now, this machine I’m using as a NAS used to be my Linux box, but the need to centralise our data has meant changing its purpose to be our NAS. How can I keep this box running some sort of incarnation of Rockstor and be my Linux desktop?

It has three drives in it, a 2TB as my private share, the previously mentioned 6TB for everyone and a 500GB as a boot drive.

2

Funny,
The 931 GB amount is the exact actual size of a " 1T drive".

Do you have the drive in a USB enclosure? Is maybe the enclosure limited to 1T?
Are you sure the drive is formatted into a single 6T partition?

It would complicate things quite a bit, but you could virtualize things with esxi for instance (if the linux box is form this decennium)

3

I think it was actually less, I have it attached directly in the NAS box via SATA, but I can’t recall plugging it into my then Linux box via USB. The same enclosure currently has a 2TB drive in it, and I can see all of that space.

I have formatted it in many ways, but Windows 7 and 10 refuse to create a partition around the 931GB mark, it’ll come up as either that’s just how big it is, formatting NTFS under Windows and it’ll give a blank / unused volume if formatted (directly, via SATA) under Linux.

I would make things virtual, but it’s an old IBM P4HT machine with all the RAM it can handle (2GB), it has decent throughput in JBOD / single disk and under LVM (under Debian) through its gigabit Ethernet, so it’s good as a desktop as well as a NAS.