What's the best file system for large hard drives?

[Vogateer]

Glad to hear from someone who's used LVM before. Like I said, I've only begun reading about it in preperation for my hopeful future attempt to get a MythTV box set up, and I always assume things aren't perfect, but I have no idea what to expect from it, though I do like what they're trying to accomplish.

Gomer X, did you feel like the project simply needs more time to mature, or do you simply not like the implementation at all? You said it wasn't transparent enough, is this something they're working on, or is it just something that's inherent with the way the coders are going at it? Just curious if you have any personal experiences that might shed light on when or when not to use LVM.

[Gomer_X]

Gomer X, did you feel like the project simply needs more time to mature, or do you simply not like the implementation at all? You said it wasn't transparent enough, is this something they're working on, or is it just something that's inherent with the way the coders are going at it? Just curious if you have any personal experiences that might shed light on when or when not to use LVM.

I think the basic technology is just fine. I just didn't find it easy enough to use. It does add a layer of complexity, and it has it's own suite of tools (lvcreate, lvresize, etc) you need to learn.

If you hand Fedora a bare hard drive and do an install, it'll do LVM by default. If you tell it to auto-partition, you wind up with partitions like /dev/VolGroup00/LV001, etc. I realize you can change the names to whatever you want, but that's still more complexity, and I'm used to /dev/hda1 and the like.

I went ahead and did the install, making partitions small so I could resize later. When I got to the point I needed to resize a partition, I couldn't find any documentation on how to do it. Since there are so many separate utilities, you have to read a lot of man pages to figure out what to do. Apparently you have to resize the filesystem first with the normal e2fs tools, then resize the volume with lvresize. I did one of these steps wrong, and completely destroyed a partition.

Fortunately this was a test machine, so I just wiped and reinstalled, but I went to stuff I was familiar with. I can use fdisk and mke2fs -j without any problems, and I know it works.

So if you've got time to read all the documentation or can find a decent tutorial, LVM is worth it. I'm sure I'll try again if I do another bare machine install. I just didn't really have the time to learn all I needed to in order to make it work. It would be easy enough to build a GUI tool to interface to all this and manage partitions on the fly, but I haven't seen anything like that yet.

Another disadvantage is if you break your system and need to repair it with a live CD, you better have one that reads LVM.

[Vogateer]

Thanks for the info man, I'll keep those things in mind, and probably try it on my next install.