If you have traditional spinning (hdd) drives, some applications with high concurrency might require MinIO cluster to be tuned such that to avoid random I/O on the drives. The way to convert high concurrent I/O into a sequential I/O is by reducing the number of concurrent operations allowed per cluster. This allows MinIO cluster to be operationally resilient to such workloads, while also making sure the drives are at optimal efficiency and responsive.

  quay.io/minio/minio server /data
```

`MINIO_ROOT_USER_FILE` and `MINIO_ROOT_PASSWORD_FILE` also support custom absolute paths, in case Docker secrets are mounted to custom locations or other tools are used to mount secrets into the container. For example, HashiCorp Vault injects secrets to `/vault/secrets`. With the custom names above, set the environment variables to

```
MINIO_ROOT_USER_FILE=/vault/secrets/my_access_key

## How are drives used for Erasure Code?

MinIO divides the drives you provide into erasure-coding sets of *2 to 16* drives.  Therefore, the number of drives you present must be a multiple of one of these numbers.  Each object is written to a single erasure-coding set.

MinIO in distributed mode lets you pool multiple drives (even on different machines) into a single object storage server. As drives are distributed across several nodes, distributed MinIO can withstand multiple node failures and yet ensure full data protection.

## Why distributed MinIO?