Two disk drives to act as one?

Gen2ly · 2010-05-07 21:06:20

Hello,

I know I might get a LMGTFU for this but what I've looked up so far has been pretty technical and was hoping to get a more simplified explanation. I just got a second hard drive and it's faster and larger than the original that came with it. I know that I can spread out files across two disks but was hoping to find a better solution. What I am looking for is: to bridge the two drives together so that they basically behave as one. I looked at LVM but if I'm right this can do it, however has the caveat of being able to only work with the Linux kernel (Vista takes up one partition). Not knowing anything about it, would it be possible to do some type of RAID configuration to get this functionality? Since I don't know anything about it, I'd appreciate any thoughts you might have. Is this possible (if yes a good place to start), or is this so sort of a pipe dream?

karol · 2010-05-07 21:46:27

Imagine a pool that acts on certain capacity (1TB f.e.) not on physical drives.
btrfs should fit the bill, but the Vista parts complicates the initial idea. RAID is another solution but both are beyond my limited setup abilities.

falconindy · 2010-05-07 22:27:38

Having the requirement of multiple OS's means that you're limited to a hardware based solution. Throwing that out means you could use LVM, RAID, or btrfs. Personally, I think LVM and btrfs are the better solutions.

fukawi2 · 2010-05-08 00:23:50

RAID-0 and LVM will both do what you are after, however Software-based variants aren't possible if you want to retain Vista, which means you'll have to use a Hardware-based RAID controller (there are no hardware-LVM solutions).

Either way, you will loose the data currently on your drives since both RAID (hw and sw) and LVM will need to reformat the drives to suit their internal structures.

Gen2ly · 2010-05-08 17:59:01

Thanks for the responses. Wasn't aware of the need to reformat. Luckily I got an older third drive that I can swap into my PC and save all the data on. I'd prefer the hardware solution anyways (figure it's easier to set up) and have been looking for a RAID-0 controller and found this:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a … 6816132001

I only got a PCI slot left, so will this do or am I going to have problems with bottlenecking and such?

fukawi2 · 2010-05-08 22:40:54

Should work OK -- see if you can find the chipset and double-check that there is a driver for it in the kernel, otherwise it may not be detected.

As far as bottleneck'ing goes, it's always a possibility, but hard to say.

Arch Linux

#1 2010-05-07 21:06:20

Two disk drives to act as one?

#2 2010-05-07 21:46:27

Re: Two disk drives to act as one?

#3 2010-05-07 22:27:38

Re: Two disk drives to act as one?

#4 2010-05-08 00:23:50

Re: Two disk drives to act as one?

#5 2010-05-08 17:59:01

Re: Two disk drives to act as one?

#6 2010-05-08 22:40:54

Re: Two disk drives to act as one?

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