[Discuss] Insight about LVM

[richb at pioneer.ci.net (Rich Braun)]

David Rosenstrauch <darose at darose.net>
> If you have a logical volume that spans multiple HDD's, and one of the
> disks goes bad, the file system on your LV will be corrupted/lost.  (I
> think this is similar to RAID-0?)  So, [installed] physical volumes
> should be redundant RAID
> devices themselves to avoid this problem.

Yes.

And I believe I first said this here on the BLU list sometime around, oh, 2003
or so.  Motherboards almost always have 6 or more SATA connectors, brand-new
disk drives have plummeted to about $60.  CPU and RAM overhead is negligible
(under 3%) when you set up software RAID1 or RAID10.  And you get 2x the read
performance if you use RAID1/RAID10.

Q.E.D., unless you're concerned about 60 bucks (or the $4 annual electric bill
per drive), then there is no reason not to install hard drives as pairs.

Ever.

Even if you can't spare the $60--you probably have old disk drives lying
around that you can use.  For free.

Never run Linux without RAID.

Ever!

-rich