Adding hard drives to a running server Hi all, it has just occurred to me that the current hard drives i'm using aren't very big, so I'm curious about how to add additional hard drives to my server so I don't run out of space. How do must admins go about this? I have one hard drive that has /root /boot and swap space, and my second hard drive /home is running very low. How can I make /home bigger without interrupting it's operation? Should I get a RAID card (could this do that)? Basically say its a 500GB HD, now how can I make it an additional 500GB or more bigger (I'm not looking for the buy a 1TB HD solution, since then how would you add another 1TB to that current setup). Thanks all for your input
This worked for me: from forums.scotsnewsletter.com following this thread from there may help more: http://forums.scotsnewsletter.com/index.php?showtopic=17827&hl= or you could try: http://groups.google.com/group/alt....3754fc41676?lnk=st&q=&rnum=1#66a1d3754fc41676
if you use LVM then you can add new drives and simply assign them to the same volume group as your previous volumes, so you don't need to repartition. If they are external drives usb/esata/firewire, then you do not even need to reboot. I think if you have internal SATA drives then you can also hotplug them, but be sure to check the controller card supports this as not all do. If you do not use LVM then it involves a lot more work
Okay I like that idea a lot. Now My last question is can I use a hardware raid with a software LVM? I don't see why I couldn't do this though. For example if I have 5 hard drives on a LVM, I could then have them connected to 5 other hard drives in RAID 1 or something using hardware. So basically using LVM would defeat using RAID 0 and having to partition or format my disks, since I'm pretty with RAID 0 you can just start adding hard drives to extend partitions in other hard drive's size.
