I saw documentation for expanding storage by transferring data and swapping out a smaller drive for a larger one. Is there a mechanism for expanding horizontally (something like LVM for example) where capacity could be increased by adding additional drives and expanding the data partition onto them?
Not at this time. StartOS is only designed to use one data drive. So go as big as you can from the start or use the Transfer Data Guide to upgrade your server to a larger drive.
The use of more than one drive will become available in future versions.
Thanks. Will the future plan for supporting multiple drives include the ability to combine them into a single volume (something like LVM)?
A simplified example of what I’m hoping will be supported in the future: Say I started with a 1TB drive and running Bitcoin Core service (unpruned). Then in the future when the Bitcoin blockchain started to fill that space up, I’d like to be able to add a 500GB drive, and expand the capacity of the existing datadir onto it (rather than needing to purchase one larger drive to replace the smaller one)
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I think having the data of certain services be able to expand over multiple drives, or having the ability to extend and join partitions is getting pretty far out there. The ability to just have multiple drives and set a service to use a specific one for data is itself just now on the drawing board to add in future versions.
For the level of precision you’re asking for, it might make more sense to separate StartOS from the underlying hardware entirely by running it in a VM.
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Perhaps, though I’m not sure I would consider this an unusual or advanced use case (granted, maybe not a phase one multi- drive feature). The average non-techy user adding a second drive will often not be doing so because he wants two drives per se, but rather because he needs more space.
But I’m sure you can imagine the complexity of having docker containers spread across different drives, and their data mounts also spread across yet more drives and then having to manage them. It’ll take some work. Perhaps playing with extendible partitions will be easier.
You can view some related feature requests here. Feel free to add to them or comment on them!
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Of course, I’m definitely not trying to claim that it should be easy to implement. Until recently I would have said designing a server simple enough for an average pleb to run and understand intuitively was impossible, but then I found Start9. Figuring out how to make something complex seem effortless to an end user is definitely a skill not many of us posses.
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