Make multiple disks act as one

**BrokenKingpin** · June 21st, 2011

I have a home media server that has 4 hard disks in it. The first is an 80 GB OS disk, and the other 3 are data disks (all 500 GB, but different makes/models).

Is there an easy way to make Ubuntu see the 3 data disks as one disk/partition? Can I do this with LVM, or do I need to use RAID/JBOD for something like this? It would also be nice if I could add an additional disk later on without having to break the existing configuration. Also, if would be awesome if I didn't have to format the existing data to get them into the new configuration.

Any help would be great, thanks!

**grahammechanical** · June 21st, 2011

This link might help:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical...er_%28Linux%29

Regards.

**BrokenKingpin** · June 21st, 2011

Okay, so LVM seems to be what I am looking for, but I have no idea where to start? Is there a GUI tool that will allow me to easily create an LVM with the three disks... and will I have to format them to setup the LVM?

**BrokenKingpin** · June 22nd, 2011

Anyone?

**BrokenKingpin** · June 24th, 2011

I am marking this as solved. I didn't want to mess around with LVM just so I didn't accidentally blow away my data.

What I ended up using was symlinks to the other disks form the main one. It is a dirty solution, but will have to do until I get all my data backed up and trying my luck with LVM.

**linuxford** · July 30th, 2011

There is another thread that I think that will be of help.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...hlight=lvm+gui

Basically, go to package manager and add "system-config-lvm" and then type "system-config-lvm" at a regular linux terminal shell. This loads a gui tool.