Knowledgebase

Adding a Secondary Storage Drive to Your VPS

If you have opted for a storage add-on and the drive has been added as a secondary drive (apart from your boot drive), you will need to manually configure it in the operating system, depending on your Linux distribution.

This is typically a simple task, taking between 1 and 15 minutes, and only needs to be done once per drive.

You can also use a web-based GUI tool like Cockpit to simplify the process.

Example: Installing Cockpit on Debian 12

1. Install Cockpit: apt -y install cockpit

2. Enable the Cockpit service: systemctl enable cockpit.socket
3. If you want to log in as the root user, remove root from this file: /etc/cockpit/disallowed-users
4. Access Cockpit via your browser: https://your-server-ip:9090
   
   

Once logged in, navigate to the Storage section to manage your add-on drive.

Manual CLI Setup Recommendations

If you prefer to configure the drive manually using the command line, keep the following best practices in mind (based on extensive internal testing):

• Always mount the drive using its UUID in /etc/fstab.

• Use a GPT partition table instead of MBR (MBR is limited to 2TB).

• Format the drive using the XFS filesystem (not EXT4). Do not use ZFS on VPS environments.

• Mount the drive under a descriptive path, such as: /mnt/XXTB-disk0Y

Useful Guides

We recommend referring to the following articles for detailed instructions. Be sure to substitute the drive name and device ID according to your system:

• Mounting a Disk in Linux (Worldstream)

• Partitioning & Formatting Drives (DigitalOcean)

• Using UUIDs in fstab (Cyberciti - Ubuntu/Debian)

• Adding a New Disk (CentOS)

Version: 2
Date: May 22, 2025