How do I change location of Cassandra storage files?

Question

I am running a single node test instance of Apache Cassandra. I would like to change the location of where Cassandra stores its files to an external disk.

How can I change it?

Answer 1

You should have a good look at the main cassandra.yaml configuration file. Actually, it's good practice to try and understand as much of it as you can, since it reflects Cassandra's model and inner workings nicely.

You want to change this parameter (as per the documentation):

data_file_directories¶
    (Default: /var/lib/cassandra/data ) The directory location where table data
    (SSTables) is stored.