All,
Think i have made some progress i tried to unmount the two large physical disks and re add when doing so i got the screen below:
So i guess that explains the volume of files created, however this seems crazy that the disk files replicate the exact size which effectively means there is only 500Gb useable on a 1tb drive.
This also presents another problem in that because the freenas filesystem is unreadable by VMware i would need to store these disk files on another drive or within the freenas CIFS share.
I guess there are two outstanding questions then:
1. Is there anyway to bypass or reduce the size of these disk files?
2. When adding the disk would selecting independent mode bypass/prevent these files growing?
Thanks in advance.