I've long wanted to delve into these methods of HD manipulation but here's the thing: I only have 1 hard drive -- a 1TB, and the more I read the more it seems the main point of using these techniques is to utilize that extra layer of abstraction to bridge HDD's in some version of a RAID setup.

Of course I've also read the performance is better, along with snapshot capability, on-the-fly partition resizing, striping, etc. These prospects excite me. So finally, two questions:

1) With just one physical drive, is it worth creating a new partition table to include these technologies?
2) With all of the above methods, there is no way I can keep the data on any part of this PV if I want to venture into LVM, ZFS or Btrfs, correct?

p.s. I've got 12 partitions (one swap, one extended, one very large one logical partition that serves the 9 linux distros which fill the remaining partitions as a hold of media, documents, music, etc.

Some of the benefits would be:

1) With LVM we can replace the requirement for extended partitions. And you get the option of any number of logical volumes.

2) Btrfs does metadata and data checksums.

3) ZFS also does some.

I see, so at the very least I'll look into which one suits my situation the best.. I just didn't know if anyone used these techniques with just one HDD. Thanks!

Oh and I'm presuming there's no way for me to retain the data within my current .5TB media partition (logical) if I were to take the plunge?

I use LVM to scale my hard drives as one large pool. I also use LVM to do snapshots. So before doing a system or package upgrade, I'll create a snapshot of the LVM logical volume and then mount it as read only, that way If the upgrade messes up something or some packages break, I can use the snapshot to revert back to the way my system was.

I never tried brtfs because it was either in the alpha or beta stages, I'm not sure what is the latest status now.

As for ZFS, linux never had a native ZFS filesystem, so I haven't tried that either. It is available for the BSDs and the oracle unix operating system.

1 members found this post helpful.

Are you aware of ZFS on Linux?

No, But I do now


My comment on ZFS was when it wasn't available for linux at that time and so, I couldn't use it.

LVM is a(nother) block device layer - seemed the wrong answer to me. ZFS on the other hand seemed conceptually much better. Was enough (along with dtrace) to get me to attempt to get my head around OpenSolaris. I failed.
ZFS came too late to the (Linux) game for me - btrfs has been available for years. Has acquired most of the features I want (some very recently). Of interest to the OP may be the ability to convert ext[34] to btrfs in-place - and revert in need.
Has been my filesystem of choice for years - root file system and various RAID configurations for user data. Never broken except where I did it deliberately for testing.

Regardless of which you choose, snapshots alone almost make the change-over worth any grief.

1 members found this post helpful.

Much appreciated -- I'll look into the ext* conversion, thanks!

ZFS is available as a fuse module for linux with cddl license.