Two drives, one volume?

FooAtari

FooAtari

FooAtari

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My Linux rig has two HD's one 320Gb which is my system disk, holding the OS, images, documents, music etc

And I have a 500Gb disk holding video files. I need more space for video.

What I wanted to do if possible is add a 750Gb disk and create one, erm, volume (is that the right word here?) with the 500Gb and 750Gb disk giving me 1.2Tb. Is there any way to do this without loosing the data on the 500Gb drive?

I want to create one volume so that I can keep the files and folders in alphabetical order without having to move the files once one disk becomes full and I need to add more files to it. And so I can view it is as 1 disk.

Hope that makes sense
 
FooAtari said:
My Linux rig has two HD's one 320Gb which is my system disk, holding the OS, images, documents, music etc

And I have a 500Gb disk holding video files. I need more space for video.

What I wanted to do if possible is add a 750Gb disk and create one, erm, volume (is that the right word here?) with the 500Gb and 750Gb disk giving me 1.2Tb. Is there any way to do this without loosing the data on the 500Gb drive?

I want to create one volume so that I can keep the files and folders in alphabetical order without having to move the files once one disk becomes full and I need to add more files to it. And so I can view it is as 1 disk.

Hope that makes sense
Click to expand...

dead easy... create a new folder and mount it there.

linux fs is hierachical - i.e. all drives are mounted under /
 
I want to create one volume so that I can keep the files and folders in alphabetical order without having to move the files once one disk becomes full and I need to add more files to it. And so I can view it is as 1 disk
Click to expand...


ZFS ( zetabyte file system ) would allow what you're asking ( or at least I think what you're asking ). It creates a virtual storage pool from all your physical drives.So rather than your current two separate physical drives you would have one virtual drive.So in this case, when your video directory gets close to full you could just add your new 750G drive to the storage pool.

No need to create a new mount point for the new hard drive, as the virtual storage pool has increased by 750G. Then you cold just continue to add to your existing video directory without any worry.



Unfortunately ZFS is not available in Linux, well not at the moment anyway. Available in Solaris/OpenSolaris, FreeBSD.


Anyway,because you can only mount one hard drive partition at one place at the same time.You would need two mount points for each hard drive used for the video collection and then you would have to figure some way of organising the data.Something like this would be simple...

Create a mount point called /videos or /home/FooAtari/videos, I'll just use /videos in this case. Then within that directory create two other mount points called a-j and k-z ( when I say mount points I mean folders ).


Then you can mount the hard drives, 500G at mount point /videos/a-j/ and 750G at /videos/k-z . Or either way around, it's up to you which is more logical, names and all etc.All you would have to do is sort out the files into the right folders etc.


Hope that make sense...
 
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As above, a logical volume would be the way to go. You can add new physical drives to an existing logical volume, not sure if you can create from scratch while preserving data though.

Maybe you could create a logical volume based on the new 750Gb drive, copy the existing video across and then add the 500Gb drive to that logical volume?
 
AndrewP said:
As above, a logical volume would be the way to go. You can add new physical drives to an existing logical volume, not sure if you can create from scratch while preserving data though.

Maybe you could create a logical volume based on the new 750Gb drive, copy the existing video across and then add the 500Gb drive to that logical volume?
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions. Looks like cresting the logical volume is the way to go. I guess I would need to do something like Andrew suggested. Create the logical volume on the new 750Gb drive, copy everything over and then add the 500Gb drive to the volume.

Not sure I understand exactly how to do that, but thats what google is for. Anyone offer some more details?
 
I've only set volumes up when installing a new OS, but http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/commontask.html should cover the command-line stuff. For example, the lvm2 package is in the CentOS repositories and there's a system-config GUI tool which should be straightforward to use if the installer was anything to go by. Presumably other distros will have similar options for installing and configuring.
 
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