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Firstly, I want to make it clear I don't care about data loss, and I understand the risks involved. What I'm looking for is guidance and if what I am hoping for is even possible.

My Scenario:

I have 3 1TB SAS drives in the server. Wanting to combine to a main 3TB volume. OS is Ubuntu Server 14.04

I want to avoid using the RAID controller (RAID 0) since I know that if a single disk fails, then the entire array is compromised. I can comfortable use LVM but I'm not sure if it can do what I'm trying to do.

My goal is if ONE disk fails, then I lose the data on that bad disk but the other disks continue to operate in the array and the files on the good disks are still available.

I know this isn't technically "striping" because no data would span across disks (all blocks in a file on one physical disk) -- Is this possible?

One more time to reiterate - lost DATA is OK, but a lost VOLUME is not.

If it's possible, great, if not, that's fine too as I am just looking for guidance.

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TL;DR: It is not possible to distribute files across RAID0 volumes.

RAID0/striped target knows nothing about files, and stripes by same size chunks so files larger than chunk size will be split.

Also file system metadata are striped across disks and losing one disk means losing everything.

But, if you do not care about filesystem, and have some very specific application accessing block device directly. reading/writing same size blocks, it is possible to activate the LV in partial mode. All access to missing chunks will return IO error. The rest will remain readable/writable.

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  • Thanks for the input, however I noted this above: "I want to avoid using the RAID controller (RAID 0) since I know that if a single disk fails, then the entire array is compromised." Any idea of LVM can do what I'm looking for?
    – emmdee
    Mar 17, 2016 at 2:47
  • This looks very much like what GlusterFS does.
    – Martian
    Mar 18, 2016 at 13:01

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