[sclug] hot drives

[Keith Edmunds]

> And you can't 
> partition a /dev/mdX directly; you need to use LVM to do this, which slows 
> things more and seems unnecessarily complex to me, but it's the way to do 
> it (I'm told) and it's how I have my server.

While it's true that you can't sub-partition a /dev/mdX device, you can
create more than one on a physical pair of disks (assuming RAID-1). I
quite frequently create five /dev/mdX devices on a pair of disks. I've
never really seen the attraction of LVM - it seems to provide little
benefit for the cost of complicating the disk subsystem, particularly if
a disk error occurs. I like to keep the disk subsystem simple!