I have built file systems across multiple drives before but that was
done during install of the system.
BTW: how much of a problem is it with multiple drive file systems when one of those drives fails? Assumption here is that no raid is being used for that volume.
It's a big problem, and the severity depends on whether data you need to access is on the broken drive. I personally don't use non-mirrored multi-disk filesystems for anything of value, because I've had enough drives fail on me over the years that I feel the risk isn't worth it. However, I'd be more comfortable with it if it was say a pair of RAID1-mirrored drives added to a volume containing another pair of RAID1-mirrored drives (i.e. four drives in total). That could survive one (or possibly two) drive failures. You could mix and match with different RAID setups if you have lots of drives.
And is a chance of such a failure a multiple of the drives in the volume? Or is it higher?
I'm not a statistician but given an even distribution of data across the drives (which may not be the case), I'd think the chances rise linearly with each added drive.
Paul.
