Quick question on using LVM2 and resizing

[MHenry676]

I'm about to do a new install of Gentoo. I'm considering using rieserfs on lvm2. I was wondering what happens when I want to expand a partition that has a partition after it. Will the last partiton move up as well, or will the partiton being expanded find the next available spot? Or should I move the last partiton to make the room?

Also this install will be on two 120GBs (Maxtors with 8mb cache). Each having a lvm2 partition in each. Should they be the same volume group or separate? I was going to divide the partitons across them (like var on one and usr on the other for example) but I don't want to have a partiton expand to the other drive. usr is on another drive.

Another thing I considered was having the last 40GB of each drive in a striped lvm2 partiton. It's just a work space for dvd authoring and video recording from TV card. Would this cause any issues when the non-stripped areas of the disks are accessed?

[trickypicky75]

If you use LVM2 and make all of your partitions take up the entire drive(s), you will have to "Shrink" Before "Growing" Another.

I run LVM2 on one of my systems, When I initially setup LVM2, I left plenty of free space on my drive. That way
I have some flexibility and can have room to grow when I have the need/want too.

As far as how you want to use the 2 drives and divy things up, I think that's entirely up to you, there are many schools of
thoughts on how you could do that. I'm not wild about doing spill & fill either.

What would I do.... Probably make a software RAID.... but that's just me.

I have an old HP Pavillion PII 450, 320MB, and slapped in an old PCI Promise ATA-100 Card (no RAID Functionality)
and a pair of 120GB Hitachi Deskstars. And used a setup like this:

MD0 /boot RAID1 128 MB
MD1 swap RAID0 640 MB
MD3 / RAID1 4 GB
MD4 /usr /var /tmp /home /opt RAID0 LVM2

The system ran much faster than it did with a single disk.

I'm sure results will vary depending on your actual hardware.