[HLUG] Multiple disk setup

[Ralph Jones]

Hello again, 

In addition to my philanthropic mission (see previous post), I'm also
going to try and add some more HDD to my existing installation, in so
far as:

- iPodder stalls while I'm out on the road in the middle of downloading
podcasts, due to lack of disk space
- we're in the middle of a credit crunch, so I don't want to spend money
on new drives
- I've got a few 20Gb and 40Gb drives lying around from previous
self-builds, from which I never got round to recovering the data, but
still intend to.

At the moment I have one 10Gb drive , /dev/hda, partitioned and mounted
as /, /boot and swap, upon which I have Linux installed; 
and one 40Gb drive, /dev/hdb, mounted as /home.

The setup I'm looking at, based on my limited experience and
understanding of under-the-bonnet Linux, is as follows:

- one 20Gb HSS as /dev/hda1, partioned as /, /boot and swap; to be used
for the OS only 

- two 40Gb drives, which I'd like to 'pair as one',and then mount
as /home

I'm not looking for parity, backup, striping or similar RAID functions,
I just want to have one large 80Gb disk. Am I looking to LVM to achieve
the 'pairing' of the two 40Gb drives, so as to be mounted under the same
mount point?

Further (these are all IDE drives); how would I go about cabling/IDE
channels?
Currently, my DVD is one it's own cable, one the first IDE channel;
while the two existing drives (/root & /home) share an IDE cable on the
second IDE channel, using the master/slaves jumpers for selection.
(IIRC, the master is on the end of the ribbon, while the slave sits on
the connector halfway along the ribbon).

How would I go best about sharing ribbons and channels on my proposed
setup?

Your thoughts/insights please :)
Ralph