[linux-lvm] Building up a RAID5 LVM home server (long) [0x05B52F13]
Sam Vilain
sam at vilain.net
Wed Mar 9 22:08:40 UTC 2005
Andy Boyko wrote:
>>The underlying principle, is keeping the MD layer as simple as possible,
>>so that you've got nice little resilient building blocks for your Volume
>>Group. Never use concatenation, striping or RAID5 at the MD layer if
>>you've got LVM, it's simply in the wrong place!
> Could you by any chance explain this? Assuming, say, five identical
> disks, is it really wrong to make an MD RAID-5 out of them, and then
> put an LVM LV atop that, for later extension? I'm feeling pretty
> dopey, 'cause I'm not immediately grasping what would be an alternative
> MD/LVM/EVMS/whatever approach, assuming you do fundamentally want N-1
> worth of available space from those disks. What am I missing?
Sorry, I shouldn't have said "never". All I'm saying is that most of
the time, you think you want this but in balance you probably want to
simply buy a few more disks, or bigger disks, instead of worrying
about an extra X% of space, which invariably will just increase
backup requirements anyway.
If you do have an equally sized (ideally also homogenous brand/model)
set of disks, *and you don't overly care about write performance or
excessive performance degradation in the case of a single failure*,
then sure, RAID 5 setup as you say is the right solution.
This is just an old saying repeated.
RAID - Fast, Cheap, Reliable. Pick any two.
fast+cheap = raid 0/striping
fast+reliable = raid 1 or 10
cheap+reliable = raid 5
Sam.
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