Mounting several drives to one mountpoint? (redhat 9, IDE disks)
 

Hi!

I've been googling all day to find the answer to my dilemma without success and hope that someone here can help me;

My aim is to create a directory that will hold data from several harddrives.
I understand this is possible if I setup a software raid0 - but if I do then all data stored in that directory will be lost if one of the drives crashes.

Is there any way to mount multiple drives into one subdirectory without using a stripeset?

Incredibly grateful for any help.

Using redhat 9, i386, 4 IDE hd's of different brands/sizes, the 3 drives aimed to be used for this procedure are all using ext 2.

How about using symlinks? Mount each drive seperately on its own mountpoint, then create symlinks (see man ln) from your "master" directory to each of these drives. The net effect should be that your "master" directory "seems" to contain all the drives in its mountpoint (i. e. a drive call /dev/hda1 can now "contain" /dev/hda2 hda3 hda4 etc via symlinks).

As for how this ties into RAID, I haven't got a clue!

Good luck

Thanks for the reply! However, using symlinks (ln -s?) doesn't quite fit my purpose. I might not have expressed me clear enough, I'll try from a different angle.

I want a directory, say "really_big_storage_dir" where users can store files.
Lets say I've partitioned the disks I want for this purpose already and mounted them as /disks/drive1, drive2 and drive3.
If I use symlinks (ln -s /disks/drive1 /really_big_storagedir, ln -s /disks/drive2 /really_big_storagedir .. etc) this would obviously cause /really_big_storage_dir to contain the links drive1, drive2 and drive3.

Now this is what I try to get around. I want /really_big_storage_dir to be a directory that spans over the three drives, but I don't want the directory to be divided into three.
I would like files to be stored onto the next disk when one is filled. This is where it ties into RAID0 I guess. But I am curious wether it can be achieved without using a stripeset. Is it possible?

Kind regards,

ozric

edit: btw, I'm getting married in Cape Town next month with my South African fiance :)

I believe either raid0 or lvm will do this. By the way, raid0 is normally a stripe. It doesn't "store onto the next disk when one is filled", it writes chuncks across all the disks.
Congratulations.