[CentOS] disk space trouble on ec2 instance

Tue Mar 3 17:42:17 UTC 2015
Warren Young <wyml at etr-usa.com>

On Mar 1, 2015, at 5:17 PM, Tim Dunphy <bluethundr at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Maybe a little unconventional, but at least it got the job done.

Adding disks is unconventional in the physical server world because it has a minimum base cost and you eventually run out of disk bays in the chassis.  You quickly hit practical limits.

In the VM world, you’re just creating yet another a large-ish file inside a much larger pool of storage.

The only problem I can think of from doing this is that it means you’re fooling the OS into believing it has multiple disks that it can access in parallel when in reality accesses to both will cause the same set of disk arms to be seeking back and forth, tripping each other up.

This is no worse in practice than using partitions instead of separate physical volumes, however.