Cassandra with mixed disk sizes?

Question

Can we use Cassandra on nodes with different disk sizes? If so, how does Cassandra balances nodes and do we have any control over it?

I've found this thread but it's quite old http://grokbase.com/t/cassandra/user/113nvs23r4/cassandra-nodes-with-mixed-hard-disk-sizes

Answer 1

Its highly recommended not to introduce imbalance of nodes in a cluster (at least within the same DC) in terms of hard disk, CPU, Memory. All nodes in the cluster are treated equal and there is no intelligence behind the disk capacity on each node.

Unless you can take the pain of manually distributing tokens instead of using vnodes, this is not advisable. In case of manual distribution, one has control over which node to assign more tokens and where less. Again hoping and praying that the data distribution is uniform and hence the node with less tokens will get less data.