What do you want in your stack?

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Because Linux is modular, a lot of functionality is duplicated by various components. For example, modern filesystems try and be all things to all men, while other components such as Device Manager and md-raid are more single-function components.

Which component provides what
Component Combine Devices Grow and Shrink Redundancy Integrity Check Snapshots
Raid Yes Yes Yes Not default No
LVM Yes Yes No No Yes
Btrfs Yes Grow only? Yes Yes Yes

Contents

Why not btrfs (or another modern filesystem)

Looking at the table, and seeing that btrfs provides all four capabilities, you might wonder why you want to bother with raid and lvm - why not just use btrfs, or another modern filesystem. The reality is that not all filesystems provide all the features you may want, nor will they necessarily provide them in the way you want.

Take btrfs for example. You may want to have several mount points, so that filling up say /home doesn't cause your mail system on /var to fall over. Btrfs provides redundancy - but only raid-1 is reliable at present. That said, btrfs applies redundancy at a far finer-grained level than can be done by lvm or md-raid lying underneath the file system. The current strengths of btrfs are perceived to be snapshotting and integrity checking.

The "obvious" stack

Apologies if you disagree with my definition of obvious.

These layers can be stacked in pretty much any order (apart from the physical device at the bottom, and the filesystem at the top), because as far as Linux is concerned they are all just block devices. It is not a good idea to be too clever, as the more layers you have, the harder it becomes to keep track of what is happening, and that will lead to possibly disastrous mistakes. KISS. And document!

The physical layer

At the bottom of the stack you will have the real devices that underlie the operating system, such as a real hard drive, or network attached storage, or similar. Make sure you understand what you have here - your redundancy relies on information being duplicated across different physical drives. If you are using network attached storage, it's even better if your data is duplicated across different NAS boxes or computers.

If you create a mirror from devices sda1 and sda2, it's pretty obvious that a single hard drive failure is going to take out both partitions and lose your data. Creating your mirror from sda and sdb will protect against a single hard drive failing, but what if a power surge takes out the computer and damages both drives at the same time? Using NAS will protect against this.

But then you have to look at your network - if you are mirroring over the network then you need to ensure that the network is fast enough and your computer is configured with sufficient cache so that the disk subsystem does not grind to a halt waiting for the network to respond. If you are using parity raid over the network, then speed becomes even more important, because if the network goes slow, the raid will hang waiting on it. You also need to understand the physical structure at the other end of the network cable. Is the NAS using one physical device to provide both of your network devices you are mirroring on?

(That being said, there are very good reasons for using multiple block devices eg sda1 and sda2 on the same physical device, but this should only be for data recovery purposes. Never do it as part of a planned data layout, only as a temporary measure to get out of a hole.)

The disk partition layer (MBR / GPT)

If you are booting from the disk, then you need a partition layer. Grub (1 or 2), Lilo (1 or 2), EFI, and Windows, all require it.

If you want multiple md-raid arrays on the same physical device, then you need it to subdivide the disk. (You could put LVM on the disk then subdivide that.)

Because these all reserve the first megabyte (2048 x 512Byte sectors) for themselves, it is very common to always create a full-disk partition rather than use bare disks, not least because accidentally creating a partition table on a raid device can easily destroy the raid.

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