On 9 April 2016 at 11:51, <phiscock@ee.ryerson.ca> wrote:
The time is coming when I will have to increase my hard drive storage. I could backup, replace the current drive with something larger, and then copy the backup to the new, larger drive.
Or I could add a second SATA drive. Is it possible to configure that second drive so that it seamlessly appears as an increase of size of the first drive?
If you were using a filesystem that supports multiple partitions, then sure, you could do that. I remember that being a big deal with Digital AdvFS, a long time ago, on architectures now far, far away... <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AdvFS> Filesystems you could actually choose that support adding multiple block devices to a filesystem include BTRFS (I have used the facility) and probably ZFS. Unfortunately, if you make your filesystem dependent on multiple drives all functioning properly, you have accepted a pretty big dollop of risk, so I'd be inclined, myself, to copy material over to the new, larger drive. (The problem is, and I did run into this, that if ANY drive fails, there's a fair chance you wind up losing the entirety of the filesystem.) But if your appetite for risk is higher, that may be acceptable. (I accepted the risk, at the time.) -- When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"