[CentOS] How does LVM decide which Physical Volume to write to?

Sat Sep 19 06:15:51 UTC 2009
Oliver Ransom <oliver at ransom.com.au>

Hi everyone.

This isn't specifically a CentOS question, since it could apply for  
any distro but I hope someone can answer it anyway.

I took the following steps but was puzzled by the outcome of the test  
at the end:

1. Create a RAID1 array called md3 with two 750GB drives
2. Create a RAID1 array called md9 with two 500GB drives
3. Initialise md3 then md9 as physical volumes (pvcreate)
4. Create a new volume group called "3ware" with md3 (helps me  
remember what controller the disks are on)
5. Use vgextend and add md9 to the 3ware volume group.
6. Add a logical volume filling the volume group then create a ext3  
filesystem on the entire volume.

Now I started moving a lot of data onto the volume and iostat said all  
the data was being written to md9. Why that array? How does it decide  
which physical volume to write to?

I could not find any documentation or information online about how  
exactly this works.

Thanks!

Oliver