How to make several drives one large hard drive?

Question

Just wondering how I would go about make say three 1tb drives one large volume? This way I don't need to section things off to different hard drives, and Ubuntu/Linux can just assign the data where it sees fit.

Is this possible?

Answer 1

The magic letters are LVM

LVM is suitable for:

• Managing large hard disk farms by letting you add disks, replace disks, copy and share contents from one disk to another without disrupting service (hot swapping).

• On small systems (like a desktop at home), instead of having to estimate at installation time how big a partition might need to be in the future, LVM allows you to resize your disk partitions easily as needed.

• Making backups by taking "snapshots".

• Creating single logical volumes of multiple physical volumes or entire hard disks (somewhat similar to RAID 0, but more similar to JBOD), allowing for dynamic volume resizing.

One can think of LVM as a thin software layer on top of the hard disks and partitions, which creates an illusion of continuity and ease-of-use for managing hard-drive replacement, repartitioning, and backup.

Here's a HOWTO