[Questions] Storage pool creation

LXD
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1

I would like to ask two questions regarding storage pool creation:

  1. What are the disadvantages of loop-backed storage pools?
    Especially: are they slower and how much slower?

  2. Can one create a loop-backed storage pool on a seperate (second) harddrive or partition?
    This was also a (further) question in How to set the container to can use the maximum resources of the physical machine

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  1. They are slower, how much really depends on the type of reads/writes going through them. The other main issue with them is that they can’t shrink. So if you use a lot of space in your pool, then delete all containers and images, the space is still gone from whatever disk the loop file is stored on. It can also be a bit of a pain to grow them.

  2. We don’t allow/support that. There are tricks you can do to make this happen but overall LXD really doesn’t like the idea of depending on some external storage that may or may not get mounted. If you have an external drive available, chances are you can also partition it to provide a dedicated partition for LXD.

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