Re: adding new hard disk

[Craig Genner <craig@gennerfam.freeserve.co.uk>]

On Monday 05 Jan 2004 5:44 am, panda wrote:
> Lou Losee wrote:
> Actually her question brings up an interesting point. Suppose this
> needed to be done in a big corporation where it is necessary to maintain
> some level of service and the question of scalability is a very
> important one.
>
> They would prefer some means of doing the same adding disks to the
> system to allow for greater storage with minimal disruption. It would be
> really costly if they had to resort to something like copy everything
> and then resize.

(Just in case any one else hasn't answered)

This is where LVM comes in.  Logical Volume Manager adds a layer between the 
physical hard disk and the file system.  For more detailed information I 
would suggest you read the HOWTO here: 
http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html

If LVM were used then the only down time would be when the machine was 
actually turned off and the new hard drive was added.  Once that's done it's 
quite quick when compared to moving the data across to put the new disk into 
use.

Once again I suggest the HOWTO as it explains it much better then me :-)

I use LVM at home and when I run out of space on one partition I just more 
from the spare space on another partition.

Craig