Ask HN: What is your database size

#1

Post by kureikain » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 1:45 AM UTC

When I migrate my infra to Hetzner There are a few disk limit such ad max 10TB per volume. On bare metal, max I can get for nvme is 24tb.

I though i never hot these

I found myself now learning table space, btrfs to join multiple volume or sepearate index/table into different volume. my database now even for a 2 years app get to 40tb.

I looked around and even on aws boggest ebs volume is 64tb.

what storage you are using? and what size is it?

Re: Ask HN: What is your database size

#2

Post by chonghaoju » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 2:31 AM UTC

At ~35TB Postgres we ended up separating pg_wal onto its own volume first — write amplification there was quietly eating 20–30% of our NVMe throughput before we caught it.

Re: Ask HN: What is your database size

#3

Post by Arouned18 » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

We’re on Hetzner too, using multiple 10TB volumes joined with ZFS. Total size right now is around 45TB, mostly cold data. For hot tables we keep them on NVMe (~20TB). It’s not perfect, but works fine so far.

Re: Ask HN: What is your database size

#4

Post by bzmrgonz » Sun, Aug 09, 2026, 6:23 AM UTC

chonghaoju wrote: post #2

At ~35TB Postgres we ended up separating pg_wal onto its own volume first — write amplification there was quietly eating 20–30% of our NVMe throughput before we caught it.

Please tell me you don't store (binary) BLOBS in your db.