7.1 Logical Volume Manager and Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks

LVM (Logical Volume Manager) is an alternative system to partitioning. It allows logical volumes (i.e. "virtual partitions") to be spread over many physical volumes (i.e. hard disks and/or partitions). LVM is supported on Linux version 2.4, and later.

RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is a system for using many disks and/or partitions together, as a "virtual partition". There are a few different modes of utilising software RAID, that are essentially:

• using multiple (small) disks for a single file system, to improve performance and to make the entire space available available on a single file system.
• using multiple disks to store redundant copies of information, to improve reliability and performance.

Software RAID is supported on Linux version 2.0, and later.

Hardware RAID is supported normally by Parted - so you need not read this section if you are using hardware RAID (as opposed to software RAID).

LVM, software RAID and partitions are often used simultaneously, but they can all be used independently. LVM and software RAID are often composed of partitions, rather than raw hard disks.

GNU Parted does not support LVM and software RAID in full, but it is still useful when used in combination with their respective tools. Parted is useful for these tasks:

• creating a software RAID or LVM partition
• creating, resizing or copying a file system on a logical volume (or "virtual partition")

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