In article <1996Oct29.144338.8556 at mcrcr6>,
<smithp01 at mcrcr6.med.nyu.edu> wrote:
>We currently keep local databases and plan to continue to do so. Howver,
>at this point we are about to run out of disk space for GenBank (maybe
>sometime in the next 1-2 releases). What we will need to do is to split GB
>over several disks. Is there a way to do this?
Many operating systems (to my knowledge IRIX and Windows NT can both
do this - I imagine most major UNIX variants can too) allow the
creation of logical volumes spanning several disks. Thus you can have
single files larger than the individual disks carrying the filesystem.
If you are using IRIX, these are set up in /etc/lvtab and then mounted
as usual in /etc/fstab.
They are vulnerable to disk failure though, so your backups need to be
good. We got bitten by this; a hard disk taking part in a logical
volume failed, and when that happened we lost the data on the other
(good) hard disk in the volume as well. Having said that, our backups
allowed us to bring the system back up with a new hard disk very
quickly, so it wasn't really a big deal.
Tim.
