I was given a second hard drive for my computer recently. Some random thoughts:
- Annoying to have to buy a bracket to mount it in the computer, and even more annoying that Sun doesn’t want to sell me one directly; fortunately, it’s easy enough to get a used one for cheap.
- Having said that, once I got the bracket, it mounted very easily: no need to fiddle with cables at all. And the box is very easy to open up.
- You would think that Linux would be well-enough evolved to either pop up some message saying “you have a new disk, what do you want to do with it?” or, at the very least, have an appropriate item in a menu to deal with that. Not so, at least on Fedora Core 5.
- What they do have is a menu item for logical volume management. This does everything I want, once I type in the magic command
# pvcreate /dev/sdb. (Your device name may vary.) - LVM is pretty cool; further evidence that there’s nothing that an extra level of indirection won’t solve. I’m still not sure what the best configuration is for my situation; for now, I’ve got a separate volume group on each drive (so that I know what I lose if a drive fails). The original drive has one group with two volumes: one for swap and one for the standard directories (/usr, /home, …) on it; the new drive, for now, has one group with one volume, /backup. It’s nice to know that I can easily, say, increase the swap size if I should want to do so, or divide up the new disk once I think of useful ways to use up all that space. For now, I’m moving more backup stuff there and increasing the amount of stuff I backup; another idea might be to create a second volume there and RAID0 that volume with my main volume on the first disk. (Right now, I’m rsyncing my home directory nightly, which gets me most of the benefits of the RAID0 solution.)
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Whenever I have two volumes to play with (which is especially easy when they are VMware virtual disks), one is /home and /opt and /usr/local and the other is everything else. That way, I can upgrade the OS without messing with any of my own stuff.
10/7/2006 @ 9:43 pm
That’s a good idea – maybe I’ll try that.
One other thing I was thinking about: right now, I have an 80GB disk and a 400GB disk in two disk slots in the machine. But I have a few more 400GB disks lying around. Now, I have no use for 800GB of storage. Having said that, if the disks are lying around, two of them might as well be in my machine.
So it looks like I should migrate /home over to the second drive, as you suggest, along with whatever stuff I don’t want to lose (I should do a survey of that; not a lot, but I don’t want to miss anything), and then, the next time I feel like doing an OS install, replace the old first drive with one of the new larger ones.
Which also raises the question: should I switch Linux distros? The next obvious transition point would be FC5 to FC6; I hope I’d be able to do that as an upgrade, but if I’m looking for an excuse to do a fresh install, that would be one. But all the cool kids these days are using something Debian-based, usually Ubuntu; maybe that’s the way to go.
10/8/2006 @ 4:51 pm
[…] I’m currently running Fedora Core 5 on my home machine. FC6 is out; following a sage reader suggestion, I’m going to reinstall the OS (in a larger drive) rather than do a simple upgrade. […]
10/25/2006 @ 9:10 pm
[…] Following John’s suggestion, I’m moving /home and /usr/local to the second drive, to smooth the upgrade. Fortunately, there’s not much in /usr/local, since I’d have to recompile binaries, but I figure even the presence of unusable binaries will serve as a helpful reminder. And, actually, the only thing I care about is ViewVC, which I believe is pure Python. […]
1/27/2007 @ 1:45 pm