>> So from what I've read so far, there is no way to do an on-line
>> expansion of the filesystem, I have to destroy the current
>> filesystem, create it a new and restore the data. Not what I had
>> hoped for when I bought a RAID card that does on-line expansion!
RAID creates a disk, on which you have partitions, on which you have
filesystems. Until we get ZFS ported to linux (hopefully someday!),
these are all different things entirely and have to be individually resized.
Download parted. It will resize your partitions and filesystems too. It
has some limitations but it might be just what you need.
I was under the impression that LVM was a software RAID system and I
wanted to use hardware RAID, did I get that wrong too?
LVM is not RAID. LVM has some RAIDish abilities (like mirroring) but
LVM's main purpose is to allow flexible management of disks.
In other words, LVM allows you to make a "virtual" disk out of many
physical disks.
Of course this sounds like RAID (adding disks to an array, etc) but
essentially these are two different things designed for two different
purposes, they just have some overlap. LVM shows up as a partition,
which simplifies things. With RAID you will generally need to separately
resize the array, the partition, and finally the filesystem.
Its generally a good idea to use LVM on servers, unless you know for
sure your storage needs are going to remain quite static.
The plan is to slowly increase the available size on this server so I
want to swap the 174GB SCSI disks for 300GB ones.
Should I recreate the whole system from scratch and use LVM?
Thats probably not necessary.
Your RAID card might allow you to replace the smaller disks and then
expand them after the data has been rebuilt.
But overall switching to LVM is probably a good idea. I personally would
add the larger disks in a new array (you can do this one by one if you
lack the space to add them all at once) and then create an LVM on top of
that. Then you can migrate the data from the old array to the new one.
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