Anders Widman wrote: > > I have a problem which I want to solve as efficiently as possible. > > The problem is that I have 13 drives os various sizes (30-120GB) which > I want to combine into one (or a few) logical volumes with redundancy > if one drive would fail. 13 disks... in one computer. How many controllers do you have ?? Are they all filled up ?? aka, using hd<a,b,c,d,e,f,g,h,...> > How would the smartest layout be? I was thinking about multiple > partiontions and then combine them into several RAID 5 chains, and > then use LVM to manage the logical volumes. And how many disks would you have in your raid5 thingy ?? Way too many pr. controller i fear. Only run one (active) ide hd pr. controller. As for scsi, more, but not many more. Why not use raid1, or possibly, raid0 ontop of raid1? > 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? Yes, you could avoid it. Run raid1 on much of it, possibly raid0 on top for speed. The 30GB disk, and the leftovers from the 2*75GB disks, can with the leftovers from the 120GB disk be turned into raid1 partitions. > Any help or insight in this would be greatly appreciaded More info about the disks, ide, scsi, mixed, controllers ?? 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