[arch-general] New Page added to wiki - Add_New_Partitions_To_Existing_System

[David Rosenstrauch]

Guilherme M. Nogueira wrote:
> I was just wondering...
> what happens if one of the drives in the lvm array goes dead?

That can be a problem, depending how your LVM is configured.  If you 
have a logical volume that spans multiple disk drives, then the file 
system on that volume can get corrupted and/or unreadable/unwriteable. 
So it's generally a bad idea to do that.

Your options around this are either:

* make every physical disk be its own volume group, thereby ensuring 
that no logical volume can span more than one disk.  (I do this on my 
machines, and this works fine for my personal needs, where I only need 
relatively small amounts of storage.  But this wouldn't work for 
large-scale situations such as where you're trying to create huge 
virtual disks with multiple terabytes of storage.)

* use a raid array as the physical volume underlying a volume group. 
The redundancy of the raid array would guarantee that the physical 
storage would still be accessible even if one of the disk drives in the 
array died.  People who use LVM in hard-core, large-scale operations 
usually go this route.

HTH,

DR