raid/jbod question
 

Well, I'm adding another harddrive or two into my slackware server and I came up with a question. I have 1 sata drive on a expansion (pci) controller, and three 320 GB WD ide drives that are for storage.

Now what I want to do is have the sata drive for the root filesystem and all, and I'd like the three ide drives to show as one big drive that I can mount (/home/files). Is this possible somehow? I'm not sure how to do it in Linux, but I need to be able to add drives as time progresses without reformatting/changing anything on the existing drives.

I don't think raid is an option as the only thing that supports it is my sata controller, and the storage drives are ide.

Any thoughts? Thanks.

That's quite easy with LVM/LVM2: basically you have to

• create a Volume Group

• add all the partitions from the 3 IDE drives as Physical Volumes to that VG

• create one Logical Volume on the VG

• and mount the LV on /home/files

Thanks, sounds great.

Might be another stupid question, but does slack come with LVM(2)? I can't remember anything of the such during the install...=S

Thanks again


Edit: One last thing, my PCI SATA controller uses a Silicon Image Sil3114 chip, does anyone know if any of the default slack kernels supports it until I can compile a new one? Or know of a place to look? Thanks.

I use Slack with an 2.6 kernel and LVM2 is on the CDs together with device-mapper, which you also need. It's not installed by default so you need to installpkg the 2 packages. I'd suggest you use LVM2 (i.e. kernel 2.6) instead of LVM (i.e. kernel 2.4).