[DRBD-user] Best way to use LVM with drbd

Bas van Schaik bas at tuxes.nl
Fri Feb 15 14:26:54 CET 2008

Note: "permalinks" may not be as permanent as we would like,
direct links of old sources may well be a few messages off.


Rudi Ahlers wrote:
> Lars Ellenberg wrote:
>> (...) 
> Ok, so just to understand this. Let's say I want to setup RAID + LVM +
> DRBD, with the option of growing the whole storage with minimal fuss,
> do you recommend the following?
>
> 4x 250GB HDD's setup as RAID 5 (1x spare), with LVM on top of that,
> and DRBD on top of the LVM? And then, I can just replace the 250GB
> HDD's one-by-one, and increase the LVM ?
I don't exactly what you mean with "I can just replace the 250GB HDD's
one-by-one", but I do know that setting up 4 of 5 hard drives in RAID5
is everything but optimal. Why not use RAID6? It provides (5-2) * 250 =
750 GB of usable storage and uses 2 * 250 = 500 GB for redundancy
purposes, which is exactly what you will achieve when using RAID5 over 4
disks and one spare disk. The obvious advantage is that you can have two
failures with RAID6, where your RAID5 setup with the spare disk can only
cope with one failure at a time.

  -- Bas



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