Re: [gentoo-user] Hard drive storage questions

[Neil Bothwick]

On Wed, 29 Apr 2015 08:13:41 +0200, Alan McKinnon wrote:

> > An alternative is to create a new volume group on the new disk and
> > mounts PVs at various points in your home directory. That way you get
> > the extra space and much of the flexibility without the risk of a
> > failure on a single drive taking out data on both. However, if you
> > are concerned about data loss, you should be using RAID at a minimum,
> > preferably with an error detecting filesystem.
>
> I've used that scheme myself in the past. You do get the increased space
> but you don't get much in the way of flexibility. And it get COMPLICATED
> really quickly.

It certainly can, but for a simple two drive home system it shouldn't get
out of hand. However, it does avoid the "one disk errors kills two
disks' data" problem.

> To get around the situation of one drive almost full and the other
> having lots of space, folks often use symlinked directories, which you
> forget about and no-one else can figure out what you did...

I wasn't suggesting symlinks, just LVs mounted at appropriate points. It
rather depends on the spread of Dale's data. If he just needs extra space
for his videos, he could get a new drive and mount it at ~/videos.

> It all smacks of the old saw:
>
> For any non-trivial problem, there is always at least one solution that
> is simple, elegant, and wrong.

:-)

I consider what I suggested somewhat simple but far from elegant. Often
though, it's a lot less work in the long run to go for the initially more
complex solution. If Dale is worried about the likelihood of disk
failure, he really should be using RAID - either MDRAID under LVM or one
of the next-gen filesystems.


-- 
Neil Bothwick

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