LVM vs. Drive Failure

Once upon a midnight dreary, while Aikon pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore...:

For LVM, you need to remove the dead drive from the array group first, then swap out the dead drive. The rest of the data should(!) still be intact; this is risky if the array is part of a root volume group (ie the bit the system needs to function). The new drive can then be added to the array group in place of the old one using whatever LVM Information Manager you have. Since LVM offers no options for reconstructing data from a failed drive, you might be better off with RAID.

Easily the best way to ensure data integrity in the event of a drive failure is to use RAID5 or RAID6. RAID5 uses striping with distributed parity checking across all the drives in the array. The difference between the two is that RAID6 usestwoparity checks across all drives, so anytwo(or maybe even three?) drives can fail and the entire array would still be recoverable. RAID5 only ensures againstonedrive failing at a time. Both systems would rebuild themselves in the background after you've swapped out the dead drive, so you can just carry on working.

For the uber option, you can mirror the array across two (or more!) machines. This is what I've done for my (high-traffic) home media centre:

System 1: AMD Athlon XP2400+ 512MB RAM Matsonic 8157E mainboard w-Promise Ultra ATA 133 offboard controller 7x300GB drives (data, RAID6 ext3) 1x4GB drive (system, flat Reiser 3.6) Ialwayskeep my system files seperate from my data, for (what should be) obvious reasons!

System 2: identical to system 1

In this setup, I have 1.7TB of usable space (4.2TB total, less mirroring and RAID parity data overhead). It's a bloody expensive, and space-inefficient, way of insuring against data loss due to drive failure, but barring a nuclear attack I'm pretty much proofed against catastrophic data loss. I hope. -- When all else fails... use a hammer.

Some people are like Slinkies; they serve no particular purpose, But they bring a smile to your face when you push them down the stairs.