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Splitting Docker between SSD and HDD

I'm in the process of planning upgrades for my server, and I'm trying to figure out the "best" drive configuration for Docker. My general understanding would be that the containers should be running from an SSD, and any storage (images, videos, documents) should use a volume on an HDD.

Is it as simple as changing the data-root to point to the SSD, and keep my external volumes on the HDD as defined in my existing compose files? I've already moved data-root once b/c the OverlayFS was chewing up the limited space on the OS drive, so that process isn't daunting.

If there's a better way to configure Docker, I'm open to it, as long as it doesn't require rebuilding everything from scratch.

For reference, the server is running Debian Bookworm on an older i5 3400 with 32GB RAM.

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  • Your CPU may be a bottleneck depending on what you are doing. The slow ram speeds will mean processing will go slowly.

    In my homelab I run all SSDs. They are cheap enough that I can afford them without problem. However, if you use a mix of spinning rust and SSDs you should separate them down into different pools. I would personally have the containers on SSDs and the data storage on HDDs. In the docker compose you can do a directory mount to a HDD pool.

    Depending on what you are doing I would say you should get into Proxmox early. Get a small boot SSD and then create a larger SSD zfs pool and a HDD ZFS pool. From there you can setup your VMs to use either. You could have a VM with one disk in the HDD and a second disk in the SSD. This setup would also give you the flexibility to dynamically move things around. Proxmox will not work well on that old of a CPU so if you wanted to get fancy like I'm describing you would need to upgrade to something newer.

12 comments