On Tue, May 27, 2014 at 7:38 PM, <thegee...@thegeezer.net> wrote: > if you had lvm already you could > simply 'move' then 'enlarge' your existing stuff (tm)
Yup - if you're not running btrfs/zfs you probably should be running lvm. One thing I would do is backup your lvm metadata when it changes - I once got burned by an lvm error of some kind and an fsck scrambled the living daylights out of my disk (an fsck on one ext3 partition scrambled a different partition). That is pretty rare though (but I did find one or two mentions online of similar situations. > : i'd like to know how > btrfs would do the same for anyone who can let me know. A btrfs filesystem pools storage. You can add devices to the pool, and remove devices to the pool. If you remove a device with data on it the data will get moved. When adding devices btrfs does not automatically shuffle data around - you can issue a balance command to do so, but I wouldn't do this until you're done adding/removing drives. A nice thing about btrfs is that devices do not have to be of the same size and it generally does the right thing. The downside of btrfs right now for raid is that raid5/6 are still very experimental. They will support reshaping though, which is one of the reasons I've stayed away from zfs. Zfs also lets you add/remove devices from a pool, but it does not allow you to reshape a raid. Rich
