Add another disk drive?

[mattbaros]

We have been running Alfresco for a couple of years and have nearly filled up our hard drive. I would like to add another hard drive to the machine and just let the the content continue to grow.

Is this possible?

Can anyone direct me to instructions on how to get Alfresco to work with this additional drive?

Thanks for your help.
mb

INFO: Alfresco 3.2 Community Edition (My SQl, Tomcat, Windows 2003 server)

[nadaoneal]

Caveat: I'm a linux sysadmin, not windows, so take the following with a grain of salt.

How big is your old hard drive? 250 gb? 500? You know that you can get 2TB harddrives right now for like $100? So the easiest-laziest thing to do in your case is probably to buy a new harddrive and use something like Norton Ghost to copy the old hard drive to the new one. Then toss the old hard drive out the window.

However, the caveat there is that if your old machine is old enough, the BIOS may not like booting off a 2TB hard disk. It looks like Windows Server 2003 is OK with 2TB system disks.

You can also add an additional hard drive to your machine, and then use a partition management tool to expand the data partition across both disks. This is most similar to your idea in the post, but it's subject to the same caveat as above - your BIOS might not like it, plus of course you risk losing all your data. You can use tools like Norton Ghost, Partition Magic, GParted, or Acronis Disk Partition Manager. See the following bb posts for some ideas to get you started there:
http://www.techrepublic.com/forum/questions/101-230198
http://www.daniweb.com/hardware-and-software/microsoft-windows/windows-nt-2000-xp/threads/1630
… note in the second post that someone mentions that Windows sometimes freaks out when you resize its system drive.

The easiest/laziest thing to do is probably to add an additional hard drive to your machine, and then move Alfresco's data directory to that new hard drive, and change dir.root in alfresco-global.properties to point to the new drive.

[mp3gmike]

Any answer to this question?…

It wolud be ideal if we could move the data to another disk in the blink of one eye… But, in the real world, in a System with 5 or 6 TB, it would be really complicated to move the whole data to another disk… It would be a huge downtime that the user should have to wait, so, is there any answer to the original question?

Thanks…

[mbe]

@mattbaros & MP3GMike:

How did you solve your problem?
Is there a way to add storage space on an additional disk without touching the first one?

[mrogers]

You should normally have some sort of disk mananagement software (Volume Manager) that allows you to map physical drives to volumes.     There's lots out there to choose from.

Or at its very simplest you should be able to add some links within your content store so the content store goes on more than one drive.    The content store is laid out such that its easy to put older content on separate filesystems.