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LVM

Read Raid Setup, the only thing you will need outside system is: "Patience, Pizza, and your favorite caffeinated beverage.". Arch Wiki article about Sofware RAID and LVM.

Basic idea behind RAID is to deal with independent disks as an array of drives. Raid 0 uses two or more disks as one, with performance gains without fault-tolerance. From raid 1 to 6 they offer diferent fault tolerance mechanisms.

LVM or Logic Volume Manager bring one more layer, read Lvm made easy. Partitions under lvm are easy to be resized, moved and there is a tool to help encrypt. There is more freedom to name physical disk names exp; production, development, backups...

Until now "from install" there is only one partition, it is good idea to have a system with diferent partitions for each propos. If is a "fresh install";

        # cd /iso/crux/opt/
        # pkgadd lvm2#2.02.107-1.pkg.tar.xz
        #

1. LVM Partition

Create a LVM partition, fdisk should show something like this;

        # parted /dev/sda

I use defaults unless to define system partition last sector, where in this example is size, +80G

2. Create physical volume

         # pvcreate /dev/sdb3
          Physical volume "/dev/sdb3" successfully created

3. Create volume group

        # vgcreate vg_system /dev/sdb3
          Volume group "vg_system" successfully created
        # vgcreate homevg /dev/sdb4
          Volume group "homevg" successfully created
        #

3.1. Search Volume Groups

        # vgscan
          Reading all physical volumes.  This may take a while...
          Found volume group "homevg" using metadata type lvm2
          Found volume group "vg_system" using metadata type lvm2
        #

4. Create logical volume

        # lvcreate -L 15G -n distfileslv vg_system
          Logical volume "distfileslv" created.
        # lvcreate -L 8G -n packageslv vg_system
          Logical volume "packageslv" created.
        # lvcreate -L 4G -n swaplv vg_system
          Logical volume "swaplv" created.
        # lvcreate -L 80G -n homelv homevg
          Logical volume "homelv" created.
        #

        # mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg_system/distfileslv
        # mkfs.ext4 /dev/vg_system/packageslv
        # mkswap /dev/vg_system/swaplv
        # mkfs.ext4 /dev/homevg/homelv

4.1. Activate Deactivate

Deactivate logical volumes;

        # lvchange -a -n /dev/vg_system/packageslv
        # lvchange -a -n /dev/vg_system/distfileslv
        # swapoff /dev/vg_system/sawplv
        # lvchange -a -n /dev/vg_system/swaplv

Deactivate volume group;

         # vgchange -a n vg_system
         0 logical volume(s) in volume group "vg_system" now active
         #

Activate volume group;

        # vgchange -a y vg_system
          3 logical volume(s) in volume group "vg_system" now active
        #

5. Maintenance

        # smartctl -t long /dev/sdb1
        # smartctl -a /dev/sdb1 | less

Non Destructive Test;

        # badblocks -nsv /dev/sdb1

7. Encryption

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