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Sorry if this is obvious, but why not use multiple drives?

Technically you can. You can run a SSD array in RAID5, 6 or 10, and lose a little bit of performance but get the capacity needed.

because that is nearly a synonym for sharding?

or did you mean just use a large capacity RAID setup? that will probably work fine for a lot of situations but it can expensive and introduce more latency for certain types of operations (but that might not matter, depends on context).

It's a server, you don't put databases on non RAID drives anyway, that'd be silly as the loss of a single drive would lose all your data. RAID setup isn't an option, it's how things are done by default for servers in order to ensure redundancy against a single disk failure.

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