What advantages, if any, would lvm have over this set up?
How about flexible filesystem resizing? If you did it the way I suggested: 512MB /boot, 512MB /tmp, you have like 960GB of space to carve anyway you like. You also get lvm snapshots which you won't get with raid seeing that this is supposed to be a backup server too.
Yea, I think for these reasons I will use lvm. I have set up a system as follows:
/boot raid 1 200mb 4 drives no spares (I guess this makes 4 copies of the data?)
You have four disks which will be paired into two pairs. If one pair goes, everything goes. Might as well use one pair for /boot and the other for /tmp.
2 250mb raid1 arrays over the 4 drives (2 drives each ) for swap
You can use a logical volume for swap. This is really not necessary.
rest of space in 2 raid 1 arrays lvm on top of the 2 raid1 arrays / 10gb on lvm /data 50gb on lvm /backup 250gb on lvm
rest of space left free to allow for resizing and adding of partitions with lvm
and snap shots.
I will pull out a drive tommorow and see how resilient this is. Does this sound like a good solution?
Actually, installing Open Solaris (nexenta distro -> www.gnusolaris.org) and using zfs would be much better and less of an administrative headache :D.
/me runs for cover.