Overview
With the onset of cheap, efficient, and very large hard drives, even the most professional systems employ several hard drives. The use of multiple hard drives opens up opportunities for ensuring storage reliability as well as more easily organizing access to your hard disks. Linux provides two methods for better managing your hard disks: Redundant Arrays of Independent Disks (RAID) and Logical Volume Management (LVM). RAID is a way of storing the same data in different places on multiple hard disks. These multiple hard drives are treated as a single hard drive. They include recovery information that allows you to restore your files should one of the drives fail. LVM is a method for organizing all your hard disks into logical volumes, letting you pool the storage capabilities of several hard disks into a single logical volume. Your system then sees one large storage device, and you do not have to micromanage each underlying hard disk and their partitions.
