I'm a fiddler when it comes to computers, but I'm also behind the times so new Linux utilities like ip still trip me up. One of the areas I'm behind is disk management. I made some progress on GPT partitions and what is happening with UEFI. But LVM is currently on my new things list.
LVM is disk management above the partition table, but lower than the filesystem. One of the main benefits is that you can expand storage on a mount point through additional disks.
This capability is really nice but has implications when dealing with different storage mediums. I have ordered M.2 drivers and am thinking this will be where games and OS live. I can try to live within these 500GB but I expect that won't be enough and I have other desire for some backup space, movies/photos, etc. To get into the concern let me explain the LVM architecture more.
There are three primary concepts.
- physical drive/partition
- group
- logical drive/partition
The Volume Groups (VG) owns a disk partition and holds logical partitions, like the Master boot Record (MBR) does for a disk. Unlike the MBR the group can manage space across physical disks. The VG can now allocate and resize Logical Volumes (LV) and the disk partition cannot be owned by multiple Volume Groups.
If I put all my storage under a single Volume Group then I can easily assign space to where it is needed and I don't need to allocate all of it upfront. Doing so means I also lose control of what data is stored on which drives (my OS could be moved to a slower disk). Thus I'm thinking through what types of control I desire for my storage management.
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