Dealing with multiple disks - 8.1
 

I am running Slackware 8.1 on an Athlon 1200MHz with 768megs and 2 80gig fastish ide disks and 1 1.5gig pio mode 4 disk which i am considering removing.

One of the main functions is as a Fileserver for windows workstations for which I use samba.

I have 2 80gig drives (identical) which I want to make use of as one.

Previously I used windows 'Spanning' to do this, but after one of the drives (IBM 120GXP :/ ) crashed, I don't want to risk the problems with data recovery I experienced.

i want the data (images of cds i own of course) distributed in a /pub/games /pub/av /pub/apps style.

Spanning offered me the advantage of having a total limit on the size of /pub and its subdirectories.

My only thoughts as a newbie are to have one drive with a mount point as say /pub/av though this will give me an 80gig av directory that may not be fully utilised, or go for a software raid solution, which has inherent problems with data security.

Any ideas?

Please bear in mind that my knowledge is still fairly limited, but I can read so urls/keywords are most welcome if your response is rtfm or stfw.

you'll want to look into LVM - Logical Volume Manager. i think there's a howto at http://tldp.org if not, just have a look on google.