Linux Spanning Drives

[Neutron]

Does anyone here know how I can add a second drive and had the first drive see the entire thing?

I have an EEE PC and it has 4GB internal SSD. I have a 16GB SDHC card and would like for the PC to see both as 20GB.

 

[cparker]

you might be able to do this with LVM but I'm not sure if you can simply "blend" a new drive with an existing one that has data on it. It might be something you need to set up at install time.

 

[iwc5893]

Considering that linux doesn't see the drives as seperate drives but rather as folders, you can always mount one drive as a specific directory. I'd recommend that the 4gb SSD be mounted as root (/) with the OS on it and the 16gb card be mounted as home (/home). This will allow you to keep all of your data on a removable drive.

 

[14karat]

Neutron,
The answer is yes. Using LVM (Logical Volume Mgmt) you can combine both drives into one large logical partition. That being said... iwc5893's suggestion would also be mine.
The inherent problem with spanning across drives is that if one drive fails, your done.
I span drives on our work servers, however, the drives are mirrored (RAID 1) drives, so even if a drive fails, I'm still covered (we do backup to a central tape library, but I hate restoring from tape...)
Like iwc suggested, use the small drive for root, boot, bin, & etc... and put /home on the larger drive...

 

[Neutron]

I looked at disk usage and noticed that 78% of the drive is from the /usr directory.

Is it possible to move that and the /home directory to the second drive? If so, how do I do that?

 

[LER]

is home in /usr?

You can move any pieces, but be careful how you partition it, etc.

 

[Neutron]

Here's a screenshot of diskusage now.

 

[iwc5893]

Here's a link that explains how to move the home directory, and it may work for the usr directory.

Move your home directory to its own partition | Linux Operating system - Debian, Fedora, Centos, Ubuntu - Linux stuff

Since the usr directory is primarily your executable files/programs, it really shouldn't get much bigger than what you've got right now unless you plan on adding a lot more programs.

What distro of linux are you using?

 

[Neutron]

Ubuntu eee 8.10

 

[John Kotches]

Considering that linux doesn't see the drives as seperate drives but rather as folders, you can always mount one drive as a specific directory. I'd recommend that the 4gb SSD be mounted as root (/) with the OS on it and the 16gb card be mounted as home (/home). This will allow you to keep all of your data on a removable drive.

The drive is seen as a discrete entity (for example /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 which is partitioned and mounted on a certain directory (like /export/home).

The various flavors of Linux can do a good job of hiding this from the user, but it is occurring underneath regardless.

 

[John Kotches]

Neutron:

Does that rev of ubuntu support mounting SMB/CIFS shares?

 

[iwc5893]

The drive is seen as a discrete entity (for example /dev/dsk/c0t1d0 which is partitioned and mounted on a certain directory (like /export/home).

The various flavors of Linux can do a good job of hiding this from the user, but it is occurring underneath regardless.

I realize that, I was just trying to keep it simple.

 

[John Kotches]

I realize that, I was just trying to keep it simple.

God is in the details.