Lvm – Combining Raid disks with LVM… does it defeat the purpose of the raid

lvmraid

I have been tasked with adding some large disks to a server that is several years old. The raid card in this server can support 12 disks, but its age prevents it from achieving any raid disk > 3TB.

I know a lot about RAIDs but not a lot about LVM.

In the end, I have setup two RAID5 arrays of 3TB each. On the server, it would be nice to use LVM to combine them into one disk. Two questions:

  1. Am I gaining anything at all by using RAID in the first place if I'm just going to combine it all in the end using LVM?

  2. Am I losing the security of RAID5 by combining the two RAID5 disks into one disk using LVM? Does it defeat the purpose of using RAID5 to begin with.

Best Answer

I think you are doing it right. Purpose of RAID to provide different degrees of redundancy and performance. The purpose of volume manager is to build volumes from reliable "chunks" of storage provided by RAID. The functionality overlaps in some cases, but I like to keep it separate. So, I would do the exactly same thing in your situation.

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