[sclug] RAID and/or LVM for ganging together HDDs to expand capacity?

[David Newcomb]

Sounds like you need a Drobo. They are external but you could mount
it as a mass storage device.

http://www.drobo.com/


On Thu, 18 Oct 2007 John Stumbles <john at stumbles.org.uk> wrote:
>
> Been here before :-(
>
> $ df -h ~
> Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
> shuttle:/home.shuttle
>                       268G  253G  1.1G 100% /home.shuttle
>
>
> I can spend an hour or 2 freeing up another few gigs but sooner or
> later I'm going to have to buy another drive. I could 'just' get a
> 500G[1], copy everything over from the 300G and swap them, but I also
> have another 300G on another machine I'm using alongside it. Having to
> run 2 PCs just to access all my data is pretty daft, as is having to
> split my stuff across two separate filesystems, so I'd like to put the
> new 500G in one of the existing machines and make them appear as one
> filesystem.
>
> Can I do that with RAID or LVM? (Or both?). And how could I go about
> converting from a conventional setup where the existing 300G disk is
> partitioned into something like /, swap and /home. (Depending on which
> machine I put the new disk into: one also has an NTFS partition and
> another ext2 or 3 for kubuntu, although neither is used these days.)
>
> I also want to anticipate the next time I need to expand the system.
> Then I'll want to replace one of the 300Gs with something bigger. To do
> that I'll somehow have to migrate the data off the 300G onto the new
> drive then replace the 300 with the new one in the RAID/LVM system.
> Would this be possible?
>
> Gilding the lily, I'd really like to have the filesystem be  sort of
> NAS box, separate from the desktop. I don't suppose commercially
> available multi-disk NAS boxes would let me leapfrog storage capacity
> upwards as described, so I guess I'd have to use a spare desktop. I
> have a shuttle which I could probably fit another IDE drive into (it
> doesn't have SATA) although it wouldn't be particularly low power. Any
> other options?
>
>
> I'm running debian etch on both machines.
>
>
> [1] seem to be best !/$ atm: @ ~ ?70-80 with a USB caddy thrown in
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128603
> http://www.ebuyer.com/product/128465
>
> -- 
> John Stumbles



Regards,
David
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