[mythtv-users] Questions about transitioning to new MythBox

[Robert Kulagowski]

> 4.	Ext3, JFS, ReiserFS, LVM... decisions, decisions... I 
> don't have much 
> for HD storage but the transparent upgradeability of LVM is 
> appealing.  How 
> much effort to make that go and add/remove devices?  Horror stories?

I ran ext3 over LVM for a while, then switched to xfs over LVM once I
saw the benchmarks for deleting large files that were posted here a
while ago.  XFS was much quicker with file deletes.

Something that I encountered with LVM (don't know if this has changed)
was difficulty in taking a PV out of use when the hard drive started to
go bad.  Since I was using standard ATA ports on the motherboard, once
the drive started to flake out it would affect the other drive on the
chain, and from then it was only a matter of time until the server
locked up.  Rebooting would often allow me to run again for 30 minutes
to days at a time, but my log was filling with CRC errors from that
drive.

In this case it was a 200GB drive; I didn't have any 200GB drives
available.  I put in a 120GB and an 80GB, hoping that would be
sufficient, but it wasn't; there was no way to take the extents that
were on that 200GB drive and migrate them to other drives, even if the
total number of extents available amongst the various drives was enough
to do a 1-for-1 replacement.

The only migration path would be to take a single 200GB+ drive and
migrate the extents off of the failing drive onto the new one.

I'm now just running 4x250GB on a 3ware 7506LP with XFS and couldn't be
happier.