Re: file systems

On Tue, Aug 08, 2006 at 12:21:36PM -0600, Dylan Griffiths wrote:
> Kurtis Peterson wrote:
> >No RAID because the drives are different sizes ... main drive is 160GB
> >... 2nd is 80GB ... 3rd is 60GB :) ... to be honest the reason the
>
> Well, a 300gb drive is something like 130$ -- and 180$ will get you a
> 400gb one. I'd recommend you get a 400gb drive, move all your data to
> one drive, and throw the rest out (I use old drives for testing purposes
> -- but I buy matched sets of drives since I've run RAID for years).

I do RAID where I need high availability (eg .9999 uptime). For a typical
home system, I don't think RAID buys much since it is not a substitute for
backups.

I'd recommend putting whatever you want in the box and buying a big drive
and external enclosure (perhaps a couple) to do backups. You can
disconnect the external drive from the computer and wall power to reduce
the risk of primary and backup drives failing at the same time. Not as
good as off-site backups but better than RAID or a slave drive to protect
against data loss.

>
> Well, if you just use LVM to logically concatenate drives, it'll be like
> RAID0. You want something on top of it, like software RAID. What LVM
> allows is a layer of abstraction between your drives and your
> partitioning schemes so you can hide changes in the hardware from the
> rest of the OS, which is important if you upgrade drives or handle
> repairs from failures with minimal downtimes.

I'm a big fan of LVM, particularly being able to take snapshots. It makes
taking a consistent backup easier and also provides a way to capture the
state of the filesystem before performing software updates so it is
relatively easy to roll-back ... VMWare does it better but LVM is cheaper.
Received on Tue Aug 8 12:31:54 2006