Use 2 HDD's as one Large Disk??

omICron · 03-06-2004, 06:55 AM

I have the following disks in a Redhat 9.0 box

1x 10GB Drive (Operating System)
2x 20GB Drive (Spare)

I have mounted both Spare disks under /mnt/backup on my system, i was dumping a large file over 15GB to the /mnt/backup and found that both disks were being written to evenly.

Is it possible to get linux to use both drives as one large Disk in a similar method to Windows 2000 Disk Striping(NOT RAID STRIPING)? to achieve total disk size as ~40GB ??

Thanks in advance.

fsbooks · 03-06-2004, 07:18 AM

You can use LVM, and include both the disks in one volume group. See http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/index.html. You stripe the logical volume (see http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/createlv.html ), I prefer a stripe size of 32k over the 4k in the example.

Alternatively, you can use software RAID level 1, where there are also striping options, but I prefer the flexibility of LVM myself, and save using RAID devices for level 5 where I can have redundancy.