I've been dealing with dwindling disk space, recently. :/ It just bit me hard after I tried to free up some disk space and found a corner-case where VirtualBox fails in a disk full situation in such a way as to render the whole tree of VM snapshots unusable. Thankfully, it's "only" a couple of weekends of a clean Gentoo install for testing purposes – only lost time, no lost work – but still really frustrating. :/
In any case, I've been putting off upgrading my storage subsystem for too long. I don't know this stuff very well, so please check my thoughts, here, please. :) My goal is 1-2TB of storage, with basic redundancy, to support my machine in its roles as my primary development workstation (java compilation, lots of dvcs activity, &c.) and general media storage for the household (pictures, mp3s and limited video; we're not running mythtv or anything, but sometimes do some dvd ripping or BT). It appears 750GB 7200RPM SATA drives are ~$120. ×4 in RAID 1+0 = 1.5 TB @ $480. ZFS is totally awesome, but I just can't be arsed to learn Solaris, right now. :/ It seems like using LVM on top of RAID is still reasonable for future-proofing storage additions, backup snapshots, &c., even if I'm not making huge use of it straight away. Except for a non-RAID/-LVM boot partition, I'm not sure of a good reason anymore (for my machine roles, anyways) to have separate /home, /var, /opt, &c. partitions … am I wrong? All I've noticed with having a separate /, /home and /a (secondary hard drive) is that I spend a lot of time moving and symlinking stuff between them to balance the two drives on an ad-hoc basis. :/ It seems like LVM can do striping, but maybe this is silly? Leave it to RAID, and just use LVM for VM? Or use LVM to compose two 750GB RAID0 drives in a striped manner? Also, is boot/livecd support for RAID+LVM "there", or should I keep a separate simple boot drive? -- ...jsled http://asynchronous.org/ - a=jsled; b=asynchronous.org; echo $...@${b}
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