Bitcoin Forum

I was reading another thread and I saw a good idea mentioned: running blockchain in different parts in different hard drives.

For example, you have a 200 GB drive that you don't use much, and you say "ok, I want to use this drive for the blockchain".

Now let's say X years from now, the blockchain is bigger than 200 GB, now that hard drive would be useless for this task, so you would need to delete all the files and use it for regular storage.

But what if we could use the 200GB of blockchain files on that hard disk, and keep downloading on a new hard drive? So even older hard drives will still be useful to run nodes.

I hope this makes sense.

As of now, no, you cannot split up the blockchain like that.

You could in theory use hard drive striping to make them act as the same drive. Or you can just copy the entire datadir to the new drive so you don't have to redownload the whole thing. Copying it will certainly be faster than a full download.

Isn't there a technology based in operation system which allows to "mount" a directory with files or create symlinks?
(I am not interested in it, just asking)

Yes, but I see no way that would not work for blockchain data to have some on one drive and some on another.

old blk-files are immutable and [theoretically] can be hold even on R/O drives.

But they are dynamically generated so you need something else to continuously symlink the files.

It is possible to set up "spanned" (https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc737048(v=ws.10).aspx) volumes which would probably do something similar to what you are trying to achieve.

It would just look like a single partition to the OS (and therefore the software) and one can span up to 32 disks.

Cool idea, could put my old hd's to use indeed.. i've got a couple 100 gb seagates, would use them to store the blockchain if I could, and leave my OS hard disk with more free space.

i had actually been thinking about this problem myself, i currently have a TB of free space so i would say i prob have a few more years before i have to think about it, but yeah it would be great if you could do that.