title: Best way for a Docker container to work with huge shared drive
body: <p>I am building an application in a docker container, that in the end will have to read from a filesystem that is quite large (terabytes) in size.</p>
  <p>The application itself will be running on another device.</p>
  <p>I am now wondering which is better to use for connecting the container to this filesystem, a <strong>volume</strong> or a <strong>bind mount</strong>?</p>
  <p><em>Only read below if you want to hear more detailed reasoning from me</em></p>
  <p>The documentation for the volume state, if I read them correctly, that the content of the volume will be in a place on the host system which docker has access to. This makes me think that when I use a volume, Docker will try to place a copy of the really large filesystem on the shared drive, somewhere on the device that the application will be running on.</p>
  <p>The bind mount documentation says that the information will be stored anywhere on the host system. This seems to indicate to me that the original information will remain on the shared drive, without creating any copies. But several other questions on this site have stated that the performance of the bind mount is a lot worse than the volume.</p>