[wellylug] LVM, Striping or not to strip...

Geraint M. Jones G.Jones at french-maid.co.nz
Thu Apr 20 15:22:10 NZST 2006


<SNIP>
> >
> > I need to know what the difference is in using LVM with striping or
> > just LVM. I realise what striping is but will this allow me to
remove
> > a drive and replace it if need be, and move the data of a drive that
> > needs to be replaced? What other caveats could there be?
</SNIP>

LVM does not provide fault tolerance. if you have all your disks grouped
as one LVM volume and one disk does then all data is gone

To me (and this is just an opinion) you would be best to create 3 lvm
groups

The 200 and the 80 in one, the 250 in one and the 2 120's in the other

And then use MD to create a RAID 5 with the 3 lvm volumes

This way if any one group fails you will not loose anything 

However your total storage would go from 770gb to 480gb (3 x 240gb -
240gb)

The above solution should give you the best protection for your money -
but will not give you the best space usage - it's a trade off ;-)

I tend to use 6 disks of the same size in raid 5 and one as a hot spare
(but then I am spending company money and if we have failures I get in
the poo)

Hope this helps

G




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