Adding New Discs

You can add up to eight discs to your Cloud Server and you can choose from two grades of storage:

• SSD storage: Fast, solid-state storage for the best performance.
• Archive storage: Slower, electromechanical (spinning) hard drives. Ideal for backups or for storing/serving large files.

Each storage grade is priced differently. You can increase the size of a disc at any time, though you will have to shutdown your Cloud Server before your operating system will see the change.

Please note: You can’t decrease the size of a disc once it has been created. If you are not sure how much storage you require, better to choose too little than too much!

Adding a new disc

The method varies slightly depending on whether you’re using Linux or Windows.

Linux method

1. Log in to Bytemark Panel.
2. Before adding a new disc, shut down your Cloud Server in the ‘Servers‘ section.
3. Click the blue Add disc button, choose the size and type of disc you want, and click the green Add new disc button.

   Please note: you can change the label of the disc to whatever you want, it won’t affect how your operating system sees it.

4. Start your Cloud Server again.
5. Open the console by clicking the ‘Console‘ button, and login as ‘root’.

   Your operating system should have detected the new disc and it will be listed in the /dev directory. The first disc is usually labelled /dev/vda, with subsequent discs labelled /dev/vdb, /dev/vdc etc. Running the command lsblk may help you to identify the name your new disk has been allocated. The new disk will probably have the highest last letter, the correct size and no entry listed under ‘MOUNTPOINT’.

6. Once you have determined the name of the new disc, create a filesystem.
   

   NB: Make sure you specify the correct disc, as this command will DESTROY ANY EXISTING DATA!

   Don’t forget to change the disk label in the following commands if your disk is not ‘vdb‘!

   mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdb
   

7. We can now mount the disc somewhere suitable. For example, you might want to mount /dev/vdb at the /mnt/extra-storage directory (please change this path in the following commands if you want to mount the drive somewhere else):

   mkdir /mnt/extra-storage
   mount /dev/vdb /mnt/extra-storage
   

8. To make sure it gets mounted at every boot, add this line to /etc/fstab file using your preferred text editor:

   /dev/vdb /mnt/extra-storage ext4 defaults 0 0
   

9. This step is optional and applies only to Symbiosis users.

   Symbiosis makes daily backups to /var/backups. It is more robust to put these backups on archive discs (it’s cheaper too), as they operate on separate hardware, so the backups should survive even a catastrophic hardware failure.

10. sudo mv /var/backups /mnt/extra-storage; sudo ln -s /mnt/extra-storage/backups /var/backups
    

    You can check that all is well with this command:

    df -h /var/backups
    

    You should see output something like this, but the numbers will vary:

    /dev/vdb         50G   53M   47G   1% /mnt/extra-storage
    

Windows method

1. Log in to Bytemark Panel.
2. Find your Cloud Server in the ‘Servers‘ section and click on the Add disc button. Note that if you change the label of a disc, it doesn’t affect how your operating system will see the disc.
3. Open Windows Disk Management (Windows key + R, type diskmgmt.msc and click ‘OK‘).
4. Partition your disc as required.