I have been lurking on this community for a while now and have really enjoyed the informational and instructional posts but a topic I don't see come up very often is scaling and hoarding. Currently, I have a 20TB server which I am rapidly filling and most posts talking about expanding recommend simply buying larger drives and slotting them in to a single machine. This definitely is the easiest way to expand, but seems like it would get you to about 100TB before you cant reasonably do that anymore. So how do you set up 100TB+ networks with multiple servers?

My main concern is that currently all my services are dockerized on a single machine running Ubuntu, which works extremely well. It is space efficient with hardlinking and I can still seed back everything. From different posts I've read, it seems like as people scale they either give up on hardlinks and then eat up a lot of their storage with copying files or they eventually delete their seeds and just keep the content. Does the Arr suite and Qbit allow dynamically selecting servers based on available space? Or are there other ways to solve these issues with additional tools? How do you guys set up large systems and what recommendations would you make? Any advice is appreciated from hardware to software!

Also, huge shout out to Saik0 from this thread: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/24219297 I learned a ton from his post, but it seemed like the tip of the iceberg!

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[–] Xanza@lemm.ee 3 points 1 day ago

Dockerization isn't a big deal. You can create a docker server with a smaller SSD/M.2 drive within the same machine to simply run the docker (or portainer) frontend and create pools of like-sized HDDs for pool storage using docker volumes to store your data on your HDD array. The most important thing being that the drives are the same size. So if you start out with 20TB drives, you have to continue with them.

Once you create your pool, you can install more drives as needed and simply increase the size of the pool by the number of drives installed. Add your new drives to your machine, update fstab, add the new drive capacity to your array, and then balance your drives.