Partitioning questions

[suvayu ali]

On Mon, Jan 3, 2011 at 1:02 PM, Alex <mysqlstudent at gmail.com> wrote:
>> If you're looking for a way to have a 3TB RAID5 PV array at power on, I
>> think the only way to do it is with a hardware RAID controller, such as
>
> Maybe I explained myself incorrectly. I'm interested in a hardware
> RAID controller, but would like to use software RAID5, and wondered if
> it was necessary (or beneficial) to use LVM in conjunction with it?

I am not sure what you mean by this statement. What is the point of
having hardware RAID controllers if you are using software RAID? AFAIK
they are alternatives to each other with their own pros and cons. If
you use hardware RAID, the underlying disks in the array remain hidden
from the OS except through some monitoring tools depending on the
drivers installed for the controllers. Where as for software RAID, the
kernel/OS manages the RAID array. But then I'm not a RAID expert so I
could be wrong.

As for LVM it sits on top of all the physical volumes(that the kernel
sees, /dev/sdX or in short the whatever you can list with fdisk -l).
So the decision to use LVM is solely dependent on how flexible you
want your disk partitioning setup to be.

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.