two drive setup

**adult swim** · May 12th, 2009

i recently got 2 older computers given to me and ive got a question about what i should do. im going to take the hdd out of the lower performance one and place it in the better one. ill end up having one computer with two hdds. is there a way to daisy chain the drives together so they appear as one drive? i did some research and i think that raid 0 is what i am looking for. does that sound correct? also i saw LVM, is that something i should look into? thanks for the help!

**fjgaude** · May 12th, 2009

I don't use LVM, dont' need it. Yes, raid0 will work but the smallest drive will determine the overall space. Also, if one drive fails you are toast, nothing left to read or recover.

Let's some links to get you going with raid:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Redunda...ependent_disks
http://linux-raid.osdl.org/index.php/Main_Page
http://tldp.org/HOWTO/Software-RAID-HOWTO.html

Hope these help.

**adult swim** · May 12th, 2009

thanks for the info fjgaude, i will get to reading!

**sgosnell** · May 12th, 2009

IMO you're better off just installing them as separate drives. You can install Ubuntu using the smaller drive for / and the larger one for /home. That helps insure that upgrades won't affect your data, if they go wrong. You won't really notice that they're separate drives in use, you'll just see the filesystem, with /home showing as just another folder.

**adult swim** · May 12th, 2009

i thougth about doing that but it really doesnt make any sense to have an 80gb root partition. this is going to be more of a learning experience than anything.

**sgosnell** · May 12th, 2009

So make your root partition whatever size you want, use a couple or 3 GB for swap, and the rest as a separate parition, mounted as a separate drive, and the second HDD as home. That's the safest way to do it, I think, but you can make it as complicated as you like, learning as you go.

**nacho32** · May 12th, 2009

personnely I would run a dual boot , your making it harder then it has to be.

**raymondh** · May 12th, 2009

Originally Posted by adult swim

i thougth about doing that but it really doesnt make any sense to have an 80gb root partition. this is going to be more of a learning experience than anything.

Just a thought ... if this is to be a learning experience, why not allocate separate spaces for other directories (/var, etc, etc, etc) ..... that'll give you more "control" when you start tweaking/customizing?

only my 2 cents

(Dunno if "control" was a good word though ... maybe "advantages" is better)