>> Would LVM somehow prevent these sort of things from happening? LVM >> doesn't affect inode usage, does it?
LVM has nothing to do with inodes. Inodes are a filesystem concept, and filesystems do not really care about the kind of block device they reside on. Well, generally. > AFAIK you will gain more inodes when you increase the size. Only because by unless you specify a value mke2fs allocates a number of inodes proportional to the size of the filesystem, with the default being 1 inode every 16kB (see /etc/mke2fs.conf). But for ext[234] the number of inodes is fixed at filesystem creation, so even if you use LVM you can't increase it by -- say -- growing the underlying LV and then using resize2fs. andrea