So I have four harddisks on this box, five (or six if we count physical drives) with the external one that is mostly used by my MacBookPro but is empty for more than half, and I might as well put to use for some storage, if I find a way to get HFS+ to work nicely on Linux.
Most of the space in these four disks is handled through LVM (I have a swap partition — which is probably silly since I have 16GB of RAM on this box — and the /home partition in software RAID6, as well as /), which is perfectly fine, as I can extend partitions where I need space (I rarely had to extend /usr and after installing the system is basically done, I had to expand /var or the partitions I use for VMs, chroots and similar many times). The drives are not all new, two are from a few years ago (with 3 and 2 MB unusable in each) and two from last year (less than 1MB unusable); if I get a decent job by the end of the year I might get to add a couple more drives to it.
Now, what I’m worried about is the load on the drives, since I’m leaving Yamato to build and rebuild packages so I can test them and file bugs when needed. Do anybody know a way to redistribute the load of extents between different drives?
Thanks a lot to anybody who has ideas!