Mount a disk on an instance

Mount a disk on an instance or a Virtual Machine to use it as storage that the instance reads and writes. A disk mounts on one instance at a time.

Before you begin

• A disk whose Status is Ready. See Create a disk.
• An instance or Virtual Machine in the same project and region, and a role that lets you update instances.
• Your work saved. Mounting on a running instance restarts it, and a stopped instance picks up the change at its next start. On a container instance, reinstall any packages you installed by hand once it restarts.
• The disk unmounted from any other instance. If another instance holds it, unmount it there first. A stopped instance keeps holding a disk until you unmount it.

Mount the disk

1. Open the instance’s page and select the Associated Datasets tab. It lists the datasets in the project and region.
2. Tick the disk. You can tick only a disk that no other instance holds. For a held disk, the tab says “This disk dataset is already mounted on other node”. On a Virtual Machine it says VM instead of node.
3. Select Update.
4. Tick Are you sure you want to continue updating datasets? and select Update again.

To mount the disk when you create the instance, open Storage > Other storage > Datasets on the Create Instance form and pick the disk. It mounts when the instance starts. See Create an instance.

Check the mount

When the instance is Running again, the disk shows Mounted on the Associated Datasets tab. It appears in the instance at /datasets/<name>, where <name> is the disk’s Dataset Name, and you can read and write it. To see it, open a terminal and list the folder:

ls /datasets/<name>

A disk mounts on an instance or a Virtual Machine only. The dataset lists for Training Cluster, training job, Slurm Cluster, and model endpoint offer only Object Storage datasets, so use TIR Object Storage there. When you delete an instance, a disk mounted on it is unmounted and stays in your disk list.

To get files onto the disk, see Put data on a disk. For help with a refused mount, see Troubleshooting TIR Block Storage.