Bill Carney's picture
Bill Carney - Tue, 2016/12/06 - 19:46

I have a question regarding storage space on instances launched via the Hub.

Lets say I want to launch an r3.large instance that comes with 32GB of SSD storage.  When I go to the Laucnh New Server option at the Hub, at the very bottom in the Advanced section there is an option that says "Root file system size (GB)" and defaults to 20.  Do I need to manually change that to 32 in order for my instance to utilize all 32GB of SSD storage provided by Amazon?  If I leave it at 20 will it launch with just 20 and leave the other 12 "wasted" so to speak?

Thank you.

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Jeremy Davis's picture

Jeremy Davis - Fri, 2016/12/09 - 08:31
The 32 GB instance storage is ethereal. I.e. you lose it when the server is stopped (note rebooting shouldn't harm it, just stopping it). The 20GB root volume default offered by the Hub is for the root filesystem of your server (which will survive a stop/start cycle).

You can then mount the additional (32GB) instance storage where ever you want to and use it as you see fit. It's a great place to put your cached and temp files. Being an SSD it may also be a good place to store volatile files that were being read/written lots. If you do that, make sure you have regular backups though, just in case you forget and inadvertently stop it!

I've never played with it, but I'm sure you could set it up to run your server without a separate root volume at all if you wanted. TBH I have no idea how you'd go about that though.

PS here's a link to AWS docs on Instance storage. If anything I said contradicts that, then most likely I'm wrong! :)

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