Adding external disk space for blockchain?

DIY, Hacking, & How-To
1

Hi
I installed StartOS on an old Lenovo Laptop, but now realizing the HDD is only 240 GB.
Can I attach an external USB HDD (1TB) and somehow tell StartOS to use this for Bitcoin Core ?
I want to run a full node, among other things because I would like to run mempool on my Start9.
Any experience or tips you can share ? Or should I just try to install Start9 directly onto the external HDD, and ignore the internal drive ?
Many thanks
Chris

PS: I’m happy to use the CLI, I’m just not sure what the commands would be so that Start9 runs on the main HDD but puts the blockchain onto the external disk.

2

Is it as “simple” as

  • mounting the external drive
  • sudo docker exec -ti bitcoind.embassy bash
  • echo "datadir=/mnt/external_hdd/bitcoin_data" >> ~/.bitcoin/bitcoin.conf

?

3

Unfortunately there’s no currently supported way to just add a second disk to a service’s container.

The easiest way to do what you want is probably to just start over fresh (assuming you don’t have data you care about yet). You would pick the 240GB drive as the installation target for StartOS and then pick the USB 1TB as your data drive:
https://docs.start9.com/latest/guides/flashing/flashing-x86

If you wanted to ditch one of the drives you could follow this:

https://docs.start9.com/latest/guides/upgrade-hardware/drive-upgrade

But beware, a USB drive can only be chosen as the data drive, not the OS drive. So you would need an internal 1TB SSD if you wanted to use only the 1TB drive.

1 Like
4

Thanks. That’s super helpful. I must have missed the option to select a separate data drive. I’ll give it a try !