Merging multiple drives into one pathway in linux

[zylander]

Is there a way to merge multiple physical drives into one virtual pathway in linux without going RAID? Im looking for something like the drive extender in WHS.

 

[tw1164]

Something along the lines of LVM?

 

[zylander]

I just read up on LVM a little and if I was reading it correctly, it seems like it will do what I want. Can anyone confirm that LVM can take multiple physical drives and combine them into one virtual drive so that the client machines see just one drive?

 

[Nothinman]

That's the whole point of LVM, but there's no redundancy. Actually I think LVM can create mirrors but I doubt anyone uses it over software RAID.

 

[zylander]

Yea I just started reading up on mdadm for linux and I am liking it a lot.

 

[Nothinman]

Yea I just started reading up on mdadm for linux and I am liking it a lot.

Yea, Linux software RAID is awesome. It can do pretty much anything you can think of.

 

[tynopik]

the cool feature of WHS is that it gives you redundancy with mismatched drives while handling failure extremely well

f you break apart the 'raid', each drive will function independently just like a normal drive

no striping or splitting files across disks or another foolishness, just pure ntfs

i'm not aware of anything comparable

the closest is drobo, but you can't just pull a drive out of the array and read it

 

[WobbleWobble]

My friend uses unRAID. It allows for parity as well. But it comes as a preconfigured Linux variant rather than add-on software.

 

[zylander]

I am somewhat interested in WHS, the only thing I dont really like about it is how files are transferred onto the server. I want my primary OS drive to be a simple 80gb HD. I dont like how the primary OS drive acts as the "gateway" to store files; files have to be copied there first and are then distributed into the drive pool.

 

[MrCrispy]

Very late reply but as I'm reading some WHS threads thought I'd clarify this -

I dont like how the primary OS drive acts as the "gateway" to store files; files have to be copied there first and are then distributed into the drive pool

is no longer true as of WHS PP1. The files go directly to the target drive.

 

[RebateMonger]

Originally posted by: MrCrispy
Very late reply but as I'm reading some WHS threads thought I'd clarify this -

I dont like how the primary OS drive acts as the "gateway" to store files; files have to be copied there first and are then distributed into the drive pool

is no longer true as of WHS PP1. The files go directly to the target drive.

Yeah, that's what's been reported here. The file transfers certainly seem to be fast enough now, and this new approach means that the biggest file you can transfer isn't dictated by how much space is left on the System drive.