Linux – Do you lose everything when you have a hard disk failure in a multi-hard disk LVM that does NOT use RAID

I've never used LVM mirroring, but the info you've dug up seems reasonable from what I know of LVM. I'd stick with MD RAID-1, myself.

If you must run multiple disks in a non-redundant configuration, and you want to be able to recover something when any of the disks fails, then, at the very least, you need to ensure that your data is not striped over all devices. When using a striped layout, parts of most files will end up on all disks, which means that when you lose any disk, you've irrevokably lost parts of nearly every file, not to mention parts of the filesystem structures themselves. This means, as you seem to already surmise, that you need to use linear allocation, which essentially appends the constituent devices' extents together, and gives you some chance of recovering files that exist entirely on the surviving device(s) after a device failure.

I could be wrong, but for LVM2, I believe linear allocation is the default when striping is not requested. Regardless, to be certain of a linear/appended layout, you can force it thus by first lvcreate-ing a logical volume (LV) on the physical extents (PE's) of one disk, and then lvextend-ing the LV onto the PE's of the other disk.

If you want to try software RAID (mdadm), then I believe linear mode is the one to use. Do not use raid0, as it creates a striped layout, which, as I have argued, leads to almost total filesystem loss in the event of a device failure.

Finally, I should add that I don't recommend actually doing this and expecting to recover anything after a drive failure. If you're using LVM or mdadm to create a large scratch space out of smaller drives, then you'd better have your valuable data protected by other means (either backed up, or otherwise easily recreated).