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Fast and cheap bulk storage: using LVM to cache HDDs on SSDs


My attempt to create fast and cheap bulk storage by caching HDDs with SSDs on Linux, using standard lvmcache. Contains an introduction to LVM, RAID, and partitioning.

There are more advanced LV types, such as thin pools, which doesn’t allocate space for LVs until they are actually used to store data, and cached volumes, which this post is about. Drives produced in the same batch subjected to the same operations tend to fail at similar times, so that’s a good precaution to take to avoid failures. Another reason to partition is to avoid the drive being treated as uninitialized on operating systems that don’t understand Linux’s mdadm RAID, such as Windows.

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