I had to recently go from a 10TB to an 18TB. Cloning process took forever, but now works perfectly.
However, when the inevitable time comes, and the drive is eventually full (hopefully that takes a long time) I am unsure what steps to take then.
Currently the max hard drive space, commercially available (unless I am mistaken) is 22TB, I did see a post online stating 24TB is available but don’t know when, and just guessing, it will be super expensive.
I know the thought of going from 10TB to 18TB was amazing, (Yay free 8TB, that will keep me going for awhile) but then it won’t and I’ll have to do this all over again, but my options will (at least currently be) 20TB, 22TB or 24TB, which only provides another 2-4-6TB free.
Is it possible to link an existing drive, to another one? or anything like that.
On MAC, there’s not a lot of options. Last I knew mergerFS didn’t work properly with it. Look up MacFUSE, may be a good option.
If you’re not going to get into proper raid/zfs storage pool type solutions, you could potential use lvm to span drives. You don’t mention what platform you’re doing this on.
Is there something that prevents you from dividing this amount of data between multiple drives?
at a guess, probably that involves managing it manually, and balancing by hand is a pain. And you aren’t really helping yourself organizing, you still basically have to remember did you put something in disk1/folder1 or disk2/folder1 etc.
MergerFS on Linux or DrivePool on windows where you have an actual disk pool manages spreading the files out for you transparently.
This should be what you are looking for https://stablebit.com/
You want what is called a union filesystem- essential presenting multiple, separate disks as though they were a single disk. It looks like Macs used to support this natively until a few years ago, probably not enough people used it.
It kinda looks like you might be stuck for solutions on a mac. Perhaps you should consider adding network storage that gives you more flexibility.
You need a RAID or MergerFS. Depending on what you need for redundancy.