Immich breaks when upload drive is full despite separate volumes – what am I missing?

Insight & Feedback
1

I have recently installed zimaos on my old pc and installed immich on a seperate drive so i can store photos without having to worry about te system not working because of a full drive, but as it turns out now immich just stops working when the drive gets full. I tried changing the volumes in the container settings, so immich would run on a seperate drive and it would also store photos and videos on a completely different drive, but couldn’t figure it out
i changed the volume of the database to: “/DATA/immich/pgdata:/var/lib/postgresql/data”
Machine Learning to: “/DATA/immich/model-cache:/cache”
immich server to: “/media/HDD-Storage/Immich:/usr/src/app/upload”
redis to: “/DATA/immich/redis:/data”

/DATA/immich is on a 128gb ssd
and /media/HDD-Storage/Immich is on a 250gb HDD (this is the drive that gets filled and immich breaks)
i have checked the logs but is i can see everything is running except immich server (but im not so sure)
i am using immich 2.1.0 from the app store
thanks

exported yaml file:

2

This is expected behavior, not a misconfiguration.

Even though Immich is split across multiple volumes, the upload path must always have free space. When /usr/src/app/upload hits 100%, Immich can’t write temp files, thumbnails, or job data, so the server process stops.

Separating the database, Redis, and ML cache is correct and protects ZimaOS, but Immich itself will not run on a completely full upload drive.

The fix isn’t more volume changes, it’s capacity management:

  • Keep at least 10–15% free space on the upload disk
  • Clean up or expand storage before it reaches 100%

Once space is freed, Immich will start normally again.