Vault drive setup, have a question on best practice.

[tfoster]

So currently my vault has 12 drives, Vault 1-6 are 1.79TB, Vault 7-12 are 1TB. We use our Vault strictly for legal purposes, so frequently when someone's no longer involved in a litigation, we export your vault to your mailbox, and remove you from the vault. This process means that of those 12 vault drives which are now CLOSED to archiving, that roughly 50% of the drive space is free and not being used.

That's alot of wasted space. We're trying to come up with ideas to reclaim this space. I'd rather not reopen the drives to archiving if I dont have to.

One idea we're floating around is to set up a brand new single large drive, 8TB, move all data to it and use Compellent to dynamically expand it when it reaches near full. Will this work? Will the vault see the newly available space? or is best practice to keep setting up small drives and letting the vault spill over to them? Eventually we're going to run out of letters of the alphabet.. ideas?

[TonySterling · Accepted solution]

So you have quite a few options available.  You don't necessarily need a bunch of drives, you could use folders or mount points for the partitions.  For the older drives that now have space available, you could create a new folder on the root and open the new partition there.  Or you can do as you have speculated consolidate to a larger drive.