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I have 4 hard disks (1 Tb each) on server.

It's debian wheezy, amd64. Disks 2,3 and 4 are not partitioned yet.

I have to join them into single partition, it must be single filesystem/mountpoint for web application.

What is there best way to do this: lvm, software raid md, or maybe exotic filesystems?

Also in case of using lvm or md, what is recommended filesystem? ext3, ext4, raiserfs?

Thank you.

Andrii Kupchanko
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  • What are your needs for the data? Performance or just raw space? What kind of data integrity requirements? – Shane Madden Nov 26 '13 at 22:54
  • I need raw mount point - raw space. About data integrity - i will use rsync to the same neighbor server, with the same disks layout each hour. – Andrii Kupchanko Nov 26 '13 at 23:06
  • You think you are going to be able to rsync ~3-4TB of data once an hour? Good luck with that. I hope you have a small number of large files that aren't changing very often. – Zoredache Nov 26 '13 at 23:10
  • @Zoredache - exactly. Files are > 1 Gb, and changes on this partition will not be often. – Andrii Kupchanko Nov 26 '13 at 23:21

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I highly recommend MHDDFS. MHDDFS is a FUSE file system that allows you to combine multiple drives (or partitions) into a single mount point. The idea is that you mount all of your partitions, then tell MHDDFS which partitions you want to include for a particular mount point. MHDDFS will fill the first drive until it is full, then move on to the next, making sure no files span multiple drives.

Pros: * File format independent * Easy to add/remove drives * sudo apt-get install mhddfs

Cons: * Lose a drive, lose all data on that drive

Extra info: https://romanrm.net/mhddfs

Syntax: mhddfs /mnt/first_partition,/mnt/second_partitions.... /mnt/final_mount_point

craized
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RAID in any mode except stripe (RAID 0) protects against a single disk failure trashing your data.

LVM allows you to (amongst other things) join disparate storage pools together.

ZFS does both of these and more.

Andrew
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