On Tue, 2025-08-19 at 16:16 -0400, Steve Litt via PLUG-discuss wrote: > > On Tue, 19 Aug 2025 11:20:57 -0700 > Mark Phillips via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> > wrote: > > > In terms of a major reinstall, should I use LVM or not? > > No, don't use LVM. Just one more abstraction layer to go wrong and > bork > all your data. It also adds more learning to our already > overburdened minds. From my understanding, LVM bestows three > advantages: > > 1) "Rubber" partitions that can grow and shrink. > > 2) Partition snapshots. > > 3) Combining multiple hardware disks into one virtual disk. >
Steve did a great job of explaining it all. :-) And I echo the 'added complexity' comment. With LVM, you turn your hardware devices into LVM 'devices', THEN you put them together in to LVM groups, THEN you make a usable drive. Or something like that. And I can tell you, while it is possible to expand an LVM 'drive', it is a lot easier to grab a new, huge drive from the store, install from scratch to it (or dd copy and expand, or whatever), and now you have a backup of everything on your original disk ;-) So, personally, its a lot of extra work, which gives you a LOT of power, that you'll either never need, or have to spend a lot of time figuring out how to use! ;-) I would like to slightly disagree with Steve about RAID. The theory behind RAID is that you put a 'bunch' of different disks together, with the ability to REBUILD your entire 'drive' if (only) one drive fails. This is very handy if your 'drive' is multiple terabytes and you need to keep going while it rebuilds, instead of waiting for the backup to restore. One thing that I think RAID builders need to consider is - one of the major theories in RAID is that the drives will tend to fail with no correlation to the other drives. But, if all the drives are from the same manufacturer, built in the same batch, I think this assumption is probably faulty :-) So, I buy drives from different manufacturers to put together into a RAID array. The other downside to RAID is that you lose some storage by having the checksums stored. Ok, back to the woodwork for me! ;-) --------------------------------------------------- PLUG-discuss mailing list: PLUG-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org To subscribe, unsubscribe, or to change your mail settings: https://lists.phxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug-discuss
