Dir Layout

The directory layout of an installation is as follows:

Type	Description	Default Location	Setting
home	Home of elasticsearch installation		path.home
bin	Binary scripts including elasticsearch to start a node	{path.home}/bin
conf	Configuration files including elasticsearch.yml	{path.home}/config	path.conf
data	The location of the data files of each index / shard allocated on the node. Can hold multiple locations.	{path.home}/data	path.data
work	Temporal files that are used by different nodes.	{path.home}/work	path.work
logs	Log files location	{path.home}/logs	path.logs

The multiple data locations allows to stripe it. The striping is simple, placing whole files in one of the locations, and deciding where to place the file based on the location with greatest free space. Note, there is no multiple copies of the same data, in that, its similar to RAID 0. Though simple, it should provide a good solution for people that don’t want to mess with raids and the like. Here is how it is configured:

path.data: /mnt/first,/mnt/second

Or the in an array format:

path.data: [“/mnt/first”, “/mnt/second”]