Cassandra adding disks / increase storage volume without adding new nodes

Question

I have to increase storage volume in an cassandra cluster, the performance and throughput however is still more than enough. My first thoughts were to only add drives. Is it possible to increasing storage volume without adding new nodes?

Is it possible with jbod to add new drives live in an running node?

Or is the only way taking it offline, add the disks and take it back online afterwards?

Any best practises?

Thx, I really appreciate your help

Answer 1

You can modify the cassandra.yaml to have multiple storage directories specified in data_file_directories. This will require a node restart in order to pick up the new configuration, but after the restart, Cassandra will start to use the new directory, and data will even out between the two over time.