[linux-lvm] Misleading documentation (was: HDD Failure)

[Scott Lamb]

On Sep 18, 2006, at 12:37 PM, Mark Krenz wrote:
>   LVM != RAID
>
>   You should have been doing RAID if you wanted to be able to  
> handle the
> failure of one drive.

This is my biggest beef with LVM - why doesn't *any* of the  
documentation point this out? There are very few good reasons to use  
LVM without RAID, and "ignorance" certainly isn't among them. I don't  
see any mention of RAID or disk failures in the manual pages or in  
the HOWTO.

For example, the recipes chapter [1] of the HOWTO shows a non-trivial  
setup with four volume groups split across seven physical drives.  
There's no mention of RAID. This is a ridiculously bad idea - if  
*any* of those seven drives are lost, at least one volume group will  
fail. In some cases, more than one. This document should be showing  
best practices, and it's instead showing how to throw away your data.

The "lvcreate" manual page is pretty bad, too. It mentions the  
ability to tune stripe size, which on casual read, might suggest that  
it uses real RAID. Instead, I think this is just RAID-0.

[1] - http://tldp.org/HOWTO/LVM-HOWTO/recipeadddisk.html

-- 
Scott Lamb <http://www.slamb.org/>