I am looking for a good short-term solution to storage space concerns on my website. Currently, I have all uploaded files (flash video, images, etc.) inside the 'files' directory in my web root (/home/account/public_html/files).
That directory is located on my high-speed main hard drive (two mirrored 74 GB 15k SCSI drive).
I have another drive with much more capacity (300 GB), but spinning at 10k rpm (so still fast, but not as good for random reads/writes as the main drive). The entire drive is mounted at /backup
Right now I'm just using it as a backup volume. I would like to create a symlink from my /home/account/public_html/files folder to /backup/files, and have all files reside on the second drive.
However, if someone accesses a file at http://www.example.com/files/filename.jpg, would it still work if I symlinked to the second drive? (Basically, would Apache/PHP automatically know to follow the symlink for that directory?).
I'm beginning to run out of space on the main drive, and I can't get the budget to upgrade. I'm running CentOS 5.3, Apache 2.2.x, PHP 5.2.13.