[HLUG] Multiple disk setup

[Andy Smith]

Hi Ralph,

On Fri, Apr 18, 2008 at 10:03:27AM +0100, Ralph Jones wrote:
> 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?

It's a bad idea and I would strongly advise you not to do this.
Hard drives are one of most unreliable parts of a computer, and you
appear to be using quite old ones.  By making one filesystem span
two drives, you double the risk of failure.

Unless your data is worth less than the time lost in buying new
hardware and restoring from backups, then I would suggest instead
doing a RAID-1 (mirror) and accepting only half the disk space.

> Further (these are all IDE drives); how would I go about cabling/IDE
> channels?

With normal IDE you will want to make sure that the two disks are on
different channels, i.e. that they don't share a cable.  You can
pair hard disks with DVD drives and similar, but there will be a
performance loss and a resilience issue if you try to put two hard
disks on one cable.

Cheers,
Andy

-- 
http://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
Encrypted mail welcome - keyid 0x604DE5DB
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 189 bytes
Desc: Digital signature
Url : http://mailman.lug.org.uk/pipermail/herefordshire/attachments/20080418/87ae6bbf/attachment.bin