Steven Lembark wrote: > > There is an expamle of my ideas at http://www.tnonline.net/raid-lvm.png > > As you can see there are 8 chains and about 50 GB unallocated data in > > this example. Can I minimize the loss even better? > > > > Any help or insight in this would be greatly appreciaded > > One way is to mirror the hard drives (requires an even number > of the same size/type) then build your LVM system on top of > the mirrored drives. Nice thing about this is that the messy > part (paring and mirroring the drives) is done once only and > is transparent to the LVM system. Okay, my suggestion would be to mirror alot, and possibly if you want to, to raid0 ontop of the mirrors, but that REQUIRES, that the disks are not hd<a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h> You should try to avoid having more than one (active) disk at the same controller at once. Anyway, mirror the 80GB disks, and the 75GB disks, possibly raid0 that. raid0 2 60GB disks, and mirror that against the 120GB, or divide the 120 gb disk in 2, and mirror each partition for one 60GB disk. The rest of the 60GB disks (4??) can do mirror, or mirror/raid As for the 30, 40 and those 2*5GB from the 80GB disks, being raid0'ed against the 75GB disks, you could mirror the 30, 30 from the 40GB, and the last 10 GB, well, same procedure as the 120GB disk, and the 2*60GB disks Or you could just do what you suggested and then only create a mirror from the 30GB disk, the leftovers from the 75GB disks, and the leftovers from the 120GB disk. 30+2*5 = 40, which is left from the 120GB disk. Personaly i dont think it is wise to raid5 over too many disks. Especialy if they are located on the same controller. JonB _______________________________________________ linux-lvm mailing list linux-lvm@sistina.com http://lists.sistina.com/mailman/listinfo/linux-lvm read the LVM HOW-TO at http://www.sistina.com/lvm/Pages/howto.html