Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Dedicated Server : Question about second HDD

[sarsh11]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask, but I have a query regarding the second HDD I have on my server.
I have 2x70GB 15k SAS drives on my server of which only one is mounted, and I need to find a way to mount the second disk. But here is the catch, I need the second disk to actually store the files from /home/domain/public_html/hostedfiles i.e when a file is uploaded/downloaded to the directory hostedfiles I need it to actually be stored on the second HDD rather than the one which is currently being used by my website and server.

I serve quite a lot of files from this directory and I don't want it to slow down my main website when there are lot of concurrent downloads and I suppose having a setup like I mentioned above would work towards that. So is it possible to do what I mentioned above? If so how?

Thanks.

[DeanoC]

Simply mount the 2nd drive into whatever folder you like. Then all access to that folder will go to the 2nd drive.

in /etc/fstab set the 2nd drive mount point to the folder you want to host from and thats about all there is to it.

Edit:
If you more worried about speed and reliability then specifically having a large folder, you could just RAID1 the 2 drives. Faster reads and safer, as everything on disk 1 will be duplicated onto disk 2.

[CoolKoon]

Exactly. All you have to do is partition the second drive first, then just simply mount it using the following:

mount /dev/sdb1 /home/domain/public_html/hostedfiles

Also, to make it permanent, make sure you update your /etc/fstab file as well.

The info mentioned above is for the case you've described first. If you want to have a general increase in speed, you should really consider creating a mirrored RAID array from your discs (I think it's called RAID 1). You'll only get half the capacity (since everything will be copied to the second disc as well), but it'll be faster and provides some redundancy as well (i.e. if one of the discs crashes, you'll just replace it and that's it). You'd need to backup your data and completely reinstall your system to do this though.