LVM vs. Mass Storage Device

My desktop has a 80GB hard drive. In this day and age, for most people that just doesn't cut it. I had been planning on upgrading my storage space as soon as possible, and with the advent of a new school semester I have enough extra loan money to consider this.

My first thought when I built my desktop back in January was that I would RAID four SATA 80GB disks. At the time, I only had enough money to purchase one drive. After researching RAID a little more, I came to the conclusion that it would be a little too complicated for me. I'm not worried about data redundancy and disk parity for my desktop, and a simpler RAID (such as RAID0 or RAID1) just didn't seem worth the headache of setting it up. Not to mention the cost of buying another three 80GB drives.

A more recent thought was to purchase a large drive (such as a 250GB drive) and use LVM2 to span both devices, allowing me to essentially use the larger drive as an extension to my /home. This idea seemed very appealing to me until I realized that in order to use LVM2 on the large drive I had to install an OS on it. I had decided that the primary purpose of this drive would be to store movies, music, and a backup of my /home, so doing more than formatting it with a filesystem seemed a little excessive.

I have arrived to a solution that I think works out for the best. I will purchase an this internal 250GB hard drive and this external drive enclosure. This is cheaper than purchasing an external 250GB drive, and will give me the same amount of total storage as 4x80GB disks. It also has the added plus of easy portability.

In the end, while a spanning LVM would be nice, it proved to be too much of a hassle and slightly overkill for my purposes.