Crawl Database disk almost out of capacity

Question

We have a huge SharePoint environment running which has one server running exclusive for crawling. The disk of this server only has 60gb left of space and we are planning in switching it for a larger one. My concern is losing all the indexes stored in this database and having to perform a full crawl again that would take about 10 days. I am mostly a developer who is starting in administration of SharePoint so I have almost no clue on what to do.

What is the best approach for this problem?

Would this work similar as a content database backup?

Thanks in advance.

edit: it's a physical server

edit2:

I found this guide and think that it could work out for me:

Search indexer low disk space - Event 80 (SharePoint Server 2010)

1. On the Central Administration page, click General Application Settings and in the Search section click Farm-wide Search Dashboard.

2. In the Search Service Application section, from the drop-down list select the search application that generated the event, and then click Modify Topology.

3. On the Topology for Search Service Application page, click New, and then click Index Partition and Query Component.

4. In the Add query component dialog box, in the Query Server box, select the new application server and then click OK.

5. Click Apply Topology Changes. The changes are processed for the search application.

6. The topology splits the existing index partition into the new set of index partitions equally.

However I don't want to add a new application server. Could this be done in a similar way but adding a new index partition in the same web app?

Answer 1

Talk with your infrastructure team what procedures you have for it. But simplest is to attach larger disk duplicate the data and do logical switch of drives, then you can remove the old one. If you physical is using somekind of NAS (Network Access Storage) then the change is very easy.