Adding and Formatting a Big Disk (Linux)

Big Disk allows you to attach up to 20TB of additional storage to your VPS. Because this is block storage, it appears to your operating system as an unformatted hard drive.

Before you can use it, you must partition, format, and mount the disk.

Step 1: Attach the Disk

1. Log in to the MyTilaa Dashboard.
2. Go to Big Disk and click Add Big Disk (or create a new one).
3. Select the size and attach it to your target VPS.
4. Reboot your VPS via the dashboard to ensure the new hardware is detected.

Step 2: Identify the Device Name

Log in to your VPS via SSH as root and list all storage devices:

lsblk

You will see your main disk (usually vda) and a new, unpartitioned disk (e.g., vdb or vdc) matching the size of your Big Disk.

Step 3: Partition and Format

We will use parted to create a GPT partition table and mkfs.ext4 to format it.

1. Install parted (if missing):

# Debian/Ubuntu
apt update && apt install parted -y

# CentOS/AlmaLinux
dnf install parted -y

2. Create the partition table:

parted -s /dev/vdc mklabel gpt
parted -s /dev/vdc mkpart primary ext4 0% 100%

3. Format the partition (this creates the filesystem):

mkfs.ext4 /dev/vdc1

Step 4: Mount and Persist

To use the disk, we mount it to a directory. To keep it mounted after a reboot, we add it to /etc/fstab.

1. Create a mount point:

mkdir -p /mnt/bigdisk

2. Add to fstab (Auto-mount):

echo "/dev/vdc1 /mnt/bigdisk ext4 defaults 0 0" >> /etc/fstab

3. Mount all drives to verify:

mount -a

4. Check if it worked:

df -h | grep bigdisk