Bryan Larsen wrote: : : > 1) I know I'll be doing something different, and I don't know how much disk : > to allocation to Partition N for Program X. LVM allows me to leave : > unpartitioned space on the drive, and dynamically allocate it as needed. : > (Note that this is a fairly mild benefit, save in corner cases.) : : The benefit is not so mild when you add a new disk to your system -- you : can add it to the group and expand a partition beyond the single disk. The same benefit can be achieved by creating a filesystem on the new drive, and just mounting it somewhere in the FS tree. It's a bit trickier to get going, but has exactly the same benefit, with none of the drawback. Note that this drawback is exactly the same as implementing a striped RAID array, which, as you pointed out, makes this approach less than ideal. Okay, so it's not the /exact/ same benefit, and it does require a certain amount of effort, meaning LVM is much easier to do. But personally, due to that nasty striped array drawback, I avoid this whenever possible.