William Case wrote:
I have looked at the issue and understand what both RAID and LVM are. They seem like a PIA; an extra complication, I don't need on my small system.
I don't think either is hard to work with. A few extra questions at install time and that is about it.
They main disadvantage I see to LVM is that 'parted'/'gparted' can't re-partition LVM disks,
I am not sure what you mean by this. I believe the Debian installer uses gparted to setup LVM. Once LVM there should be no need to repartition as LVM volumes can be resized.
and, RAID seems more suited to a much larger system and won't do much for two small disks.
RAID can do lots for two small drives. It depends a bit on what is kept on the drive. For years my mail server had two small drives in RAID 1. I also used RAID 5 when I could afford 4 smaller used drives instead of one larger drive.
I use LVM often. I find LVM most useful when used on top of RAID or encrypted partitions. My netbook and workstation both use LVM on top of encrypted partitions. The drives on both are partitioned the same way: 256MB /boot, everything else encrypted. LVM is used to divide the encrypted partition into two logical volumes: / and /home. There used to be a swap volume, but I merged the space into / and now use a swap file on both machines.
-- sg