[mythtv-users] Hitachi 3T drives - reliable?

[Richard Shaw]

On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 1:12 PM, Rod Smith <mythtv at rodsbooks.com> wrote:
> On 01/20/2011 11:21 AM, Richard Shaw wrote:
>>
>> As a tangent since were already technically OT:
>>
>> Does using whole disk LVM get around the partition limitations? I
>> don't know how LVM works internally but I assume the disk is
>> essentially partitionless?
>
> If you use LVM on the whole disk rather than on the partition, then the
> limits become those of LVM rather than of the partitioning system you use. I
> don't happen to know the limits of Linux's LVM offhand, though.
>
> That said, I wouldn't recommend using LVM without partitions, simply because
> there may be some poorly-written tool out there that ASSUMES every disk is
> partitioned and will do something bone-headed and damaging if it encounters
> a disk that uses raw LVM. Murphy's Law guarantees that you'll be the person
> to discover this behavior on your two 3 TB disks that hold your entire DVD
> collection that you've just finished transferring to disk.
>
> Since Linux understands GPT just fine, there's no point in using LVM without
> partitions, even on a huge disk.

My /home is on a 500GB whole disk LVM, but it was accidental. I was
trying out the Fedora graphical LVM utility which does not create
partitions. By the time I figured out what happened it was too late.
At some point I might back up the data and fix it but I only run Linux
on it so I haven't had any issues with anything mucking with the disk.

Richard