different sized disk -> one logical volume

potepuh

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Oct 14, 2010
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heyhey :)
So if i want to create one logical drive from disks of different sizes, with redundancy, what are my options?
Mostly don't care about OS, or performance
free preferably
what should i google? i seem to get low results
basically in direction of unraid, snapraid, drivepool

thx :)
 
storage spaces....eeeeewwwww
computer has xigmanas with zfs atm but i REALLY started disliking multiple disks and data juggling.
will probably go to openmediavault and snapraid
block devices are probably partitions? but if i partition a big disk and it fails, data is still gone? i'm unsure what should be done here. i think generally i understand what's what but haven't used LVM yet
 
storage spaces....eeeeewwwww
computer has xigmanas with zfs atm but i REALLY started disliking multiple disks and data juggling.
will probably go to openmediavault and snapraid
block devices are probably partitions? but if i partition a big disk and it fails, data is still gone? i'm unsure what should be done here. i think generally i understand what's what but haven't used LVM yet
No, block devices are just blocks of hdd you reserve for use and you can combine them as one drive in LVM or use MDADM to raid them. LVM is extremely flexible, you can freely choose how much of storage you allocate for what use and handle them like physical drives. If you run out of space, you can simply add a drive and extend your logical volume to it.
 
i feel like i'm missing something. "simply add a drive" as in concatenated drives - JBOD? i do know all of that, i also want some redundancy - similar to raid5?
 
i feel like i'm missing something. "simply add a drive" as in concatenated drives - JBOD? i do know all of that, i also want some redundancy - similar to raid5?
You can define 'blocks' of disk that you can join together as one drive in LVM. I can have a 1Tb drive and a 2Tb drive and when I run out of space on the 1Tb drive, I can create a 'block' volume of say, 500Gb from the 2Tb drive and join it to the 1Tb volume, creating a 1,5Tb new volume. The file system can then be extended to cover the entire 1,5Tb.

Physically it's spread across many drives but the filesystem sees it as one space. You can also create a raid by assigning similarly sized physical volumes off other drives but for simplicitys sake I wouldn't recommend mixing it up too much. Hard drives / SSDs are dirt cheap, just raid the entire drives and build the file system on them. Best practice is to raid the physical drives as a first thing, then start chopping data volumes out of the raid arrays. Most home users will never have a need to even play with the logical volumes but they're extremely practical if you run a virtualization server and need to isolate resources for them.
 
i use disks in range from 80g - 1000g, so doing that sounds way too much work. also i'm lazy :)
problem/idea before was i was using raid5/raid1, depending on how many similar disks i have, but had to copy data around because of filling disks up, so i would like to have "one disk to rule them all" :)
i put openmediavault with snapraid+merger on it, for a home backup + torrent computer will see how this will work
thx for suggestions :)
 
i use disks in range from 80g - 1000g, so doing that sounds way too much work. also i'm lazy :)
problem/idea before was i was using raid5/raid1, depending on how many similar disks i have, but had to copy data around because of filling disks up, so i would like to have "one disk to rule them all" :)
i put openmediavault with snapraid+merger on it, for a home backup + torrent computer will see how this will work
thx for suggestions :)
If you're lazy just get a bunch of 18Tb drives and raid them. Storage problems solved.
 
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