From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: Rich Subject: Re: LINEAR RAID, little help Date: Thu, 12 Apr 2007 08:58:00 +0100 Message-ID: <461DE688.4070808@pcfusion.co.uk> References: <46177DD8.9080707@pcfusion.co.uk> <20070407173352.GA23645@gmail.com> <4617E5E2.2090609@pcfusion.co.uk> <17948.6604.619118.556382@notabene.brown> <461DE4CA.9020406@pcfusion.co.uk> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Return-path: In-Reply-To: <461DE4CA.9020406@pcfusion.co.uk> Sender: linux-raid-owner@vger.kernel.org To: Rich Cc: gmccullagh@gmail.com, linux-raid@vger.kernel.org List-Id: linux-raid.ids I forgot to ask something, sorry. With RAID0 and all the odd size drives I have I'd get a lot of left over unused space. Is there anyway to make use of this slack? Thanks, Rich Rich wrote: > Neil Brown wrote: >> (This is maybe sort of off topic since this list about raid and not >> filesystems and virtual such either.) >> >> Maybe you just want the appearance of things being as one volume? I >> might recommend you looking into unionfs: >> >> http://www.filesystems.org/project-unionfs.html >> >> It's actually quite useful. You might have some logical division of the >> data. Put TV stuff on one disk, Movies on another. The unionfs overlay >> maps everything together into a virtual bigdisk. It's also very simple >> and no superblocks or headers needed either. > Thanks I shall take a look into it :) >> >> Linux raid0 works with varying sized drives without problem. > Ah, kewl.. I might do, depends how much drive space I loose. Speed > wise I don't find linear to bad I can read and write over gigabit > network at around 30mb/sec. >> >> If you lose one drive, you should consider that you have lost the >> whole array. You might be able to recover some data, if you are lucky >> and spend a lot of time hunting for it. But it is quite unlikely that >> you will get much that is useful. >> >> > Ah right, well for the time being A lot of my friends have the same > data so loosing it is just inconvenient rather than a major no-go. >> >> The man page is out of date. With reasonably recent kernel/mdadm you >> can >> mdadm --grow /dev/mdX --add /dev/sdY >> >> To add a drive to a linear array. You then need to grow the >> filesystem of course. >> >> But yes: A big linear array is good for scratch space, but I wouldn't >> want to store data that I couldn't afford to lose. >> >> NeilBrown >> > Cheers Neil, Once I can find enough hdd space else where to backup I > might play around with RAID0 etc I do plan to replace my odd size > drives with 500GB ones and RAID5 but I can't afford that at the moment. > > > Thanks, > > Rich > > > > >