Well, as long as you’re using a single node, it should indeed alleviate the shard disk size limit, but I’m not sure ES will handle that too well. In any case, you can’t change that for existing indices, you can modify the mapping template and reindex the existing index (you’ll need to index to another name, delete the original and create an alias to the original name as the new index can’t be renamed...)

Ok thanks!

Well, as long as you use a single node, multiple shards offer no scale improvement

But you can move shards from one node to another much more easily than changing the number of shards of an index, this is an advantage