This has been my thinking too.

Though after reading mbirth’s comment I realised it’s possible to use named volumes and explicitly tell it where on disk to store the volume:

    volumes:
      - my-named-volume:/data/
volumes:
  my-named-volume:
    driver: local
    driver_opts:
      type: none
      device: "./folder-next-to-compose-yml"
      # device: "/path/to/well/known/folder"
      o: bind

It’s a bit verbose, but at least I know which folder and partition holds the data, while keeping the benefits of named volumes.

That makes sense. I’ve only ever used local storage on the docker-VM, but for sure it can make sense for using external storage