On Fri, Oct 14, 2005 at 03:11:42PM -0400, Steve Adeff wrote: > > > another option if you find yourself recording this much is to use LVM > > > (logical > > > volume manager). It would allow you to connect, say four 300gig drives > > > and use them all as one AND stripe data across them (like RAID 0). Or you > > > could > > > use 3 striped and the 4th as a parity drive in case one dies. > > > This would most definitely give you the drive speed required to not only > > > record 4+ streams at once, but play back equally as many. > > > > > > > > > Steve > > from my understanding, yes it is, and properly set up you can also add and > remove drives from an LVM at any point as well. I recently discovered LVM so > I've yet to implement it, but I did a good amount of research and it seems to > be quite easy now and I did not see anything that made me think I'd have to > reinstall. Of course, I wouldn't use a LVM for your root partition, at least > until you know what your doing... I'm just going to be using it for my > storage drives.
Before you go running off let me give you a warning. Although LVM supports striping, adding/removing disks, shrinking and growing fs's, they do _not_ all work together. If you stripe you can't add/remove disks or change fs size. If you use xfs or jfs you can't shrink a fs. After using Raid 0, 1, 5, LVM on 6 disks with XFS, JFS, and Reiser I have settled with only LVM and ReiserFS (As much as I dislike Reiser for performance downsides with many gig files compared to xfs and jfs). In my experience, raid 5 is overkill for my desire to record TV shows. Anything I want safe I backup to another computer completely. In dealing with 6 drives I've found it very useful to shrink fs's at times, and since ReiserFS (Not Reiser 4) is the only fs that supports shrinking I use it. Striping would be nice, but adding/removing disks I've found to be a much better feature. I've also found seagate drives to run 10%-30% faster for reading and writing (reading and writing 100+ gig files) plus the 5yr warranty comes in nice, since of 9 drives I've had in the last 3 years, half the Maxtor 200GB drives have gone bad.
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