Free space on network drive

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Free space on network drive

Tim Blundell 0

In Powershell, Get-PSDrive and WMI queries (ex: Get-WmiObject Win32_MappedLogicalDisk) are showing innacurate values in terms of free space on a network share. The share has a user quota configured with File Service Ressource Management, on the server hosting the share.

Is there any other way to show free space on a mapped drive or file share via Powershell?

The Windows interface and dir command in DOS box are showing the correct value in terms of free space on the mapped drive in question.

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Answer 1

Hello Tim,

Thank you for your question and for reaching out with your question today.

If the Get-PSDrive and WMI queries are not showing accurate values for free space on a network share with user quotas configured, you can try using the Get-SmbShare cmdlet in PowerShell to retrieve the correct free space information. Here's an example:


$sharePath = "\\server\share"  # Replace with the path to your network share

$share = Get-SmbShare -Name $sharePath

if ($share) {

    $freeSpace = $share.FreeSpace

    Write-Host "Free space on $sharePath: $freeSpace bytes"

}

else {

    Write-Host "Failed to retrieve information for $sharePath"

}

The Get-SmbShare cmdlet specifically retrieves information about SMB shares, including their free space. It should provide more accurate results compared to Get-PSDrive and WMI queries.

Note that the Get-SmbShare cmdlet requires PowerShell version 3.0 or later and must be run with administrative privileges. Ensure that you have the necessary permissions to access the network share and retrieve the share information.

If the issue persists or the Get-SmbShare cmdlet doesn't provide the expected results, it's possible that the user quota configuration with File Service Resource Management is causing discrepancies in the reported free space. In such cases, you may need to explore alternative methods, such as using .NET classes or APIs, to retrieve the free space information directly from the underlying file system.

I used AI provided by ChatGPT to formulate part of this response. I have verified that the information is accurate before sharing it with you.

If the reply was helpful, please don’t forget to upvote or accept as answer.

Tim Blundell 0 Reputation points

2023-06-28T18:47:54.91+00:00

@Limitless Technology Thanks for the response! If forgot to specify that I would like to write a script that can be run users with none admin rights from any computer, not the server hosting the file share.

Our users have hidden map drives for which they cannot easily tell how much space is left (Folder redirection of My Documents and roaming profiles to a network share via GPO). Quotas are applied to subfolders of the file share for which they have access. Windows reports correctly the amount of free space when they map the drives manually though this involves extra steps.

Get-SMBShare is not called in the way specified by your script. According to the documentation it needs to be run locally on the root of the fileshare, using the name of the share, not the UNC. (ref: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/powershell/module/smbshare/get-smbshare).

Can you specify the NET classes or APIs to retrieve the free space on a UNC path (ex: \server\home\user) or mapped drive (ex: H:\ -> \server\home\user) ?
Tim Blundell 0 Reputation points

2023-06-28T19:45:32.6033333+00:00

Found it: DriveInfo https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/system.io.driveinfo.availablefreespace?view=net-7.0 . This implies that the script maps the drive for the user. In my case, I find an availabe drive letter and map it temporarely as described here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55580258/how-to-get-the-remaining-amount-of-storage-space-in-a-shared-folder

In this example, A drive is available on the machine, mapping to \server\home\user:

$drive = New-Object -TypeName System.IO.DriveInfo -ArgumentList A $drive.AvailableFreeSpace

The AvailableFreeSpace property will return the available space, reflecting any quotas applied to the mapped drive, as desired. The DriveInfo class does not allow the use of UNC paths when creating an object.

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Free space on network drive

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