Adding more space, and a vacuum question.

Hello. We have two problems (which may actually be related...)

1. We are running at over 90% capacity of the disk at one of the servers - a report/data warehouse system. We have ran out of disk space several times. Now we need to make some file-archived data available on the database to support our legal team. This means two huge tables to be added to the database. The only solution that I see is to add more space by means of another tablespace. The two tables are static - after loading them and creating indexes they will not be changed.

The machine has no additional room for internal disks. It is a recent purchase and not likely to be replaced any time soon. Now, my position is that the best solution would be to add an external hard disk, via USB/firewire, and use it for the archive tables. My sysadmin, on the other hand, wants to mount a storage machine remotely and use it for the extra tablespace, as the storage machine is a more reliable hardware. I think that remote mounted volumes are not a proper device for a database, as the network is subject to load and I've ran into frozen mounts in both NFS and SMB in the past. Never mind being slower.

Which solution would you advise and which one of us is right?

2. That database has a few really huge tables. I think they are not being automatically vacuumed properly. In the past few days I've noticed a vacuum process on one of them which has been running since January 14th. Unfortunately, it never finished, because we were informed of a scheduled power down in our building yesterday, and had to shut down the machine. The questions are:

a. Is it normal for vacuum processes to take two weeks?
b. What happens if the vacuum process is stopped? Are the tuples partially recovered, or are they only recovered if the process completes properly?
c. Is there anything I can do to make vacuums shorter?
d. After restarting the server, all the data in pg_stat_user_tables seem to have been reset. What does this mean and how does this affect vacuum scheduling?

Thank you in advance,
Herouth