Why not use software raid or LVM to concatenate the drives together into
a larger volume? I've been in the same situation in the past and this
worked well.

Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
> So, after 3 years of pressure and inadequate backups, my one department
> that never has enough money to do anything has finally bought a tape
> library. I'm setting it up on the existing server, because they can't
> afford the other components to set up an Amanda backup server (even
> though I have a hand-me-down server with no disk drives). I've scrounged
> space on a few drives for holding disk space, but there's no symmetry in
> size, and the smaller ones won't do for the larger DLE's.
> 
> So, the question is, if Amanda has more than one holding disk
> (partition), and they differ in size, will Amanda know when the smaller
> one is inadequate for a particular DLE and explicitly choose the larger
> one? Also, if I have specified spindle numbers in my disklist, so that
> Amanda will avoid doing parallel dumps from the same spindle, is there
> any way of informing Amanda of the spindle numbers for the holding disks
> (partitions) and taking that into account in the planning?
> 
> For this department, at the moment, I don't have the luxery of more than
> one dedicated drive for holding disk space. So, given the possible
> chance of backing up a DLE to a holding disk partition that is on the
> same spindle as the DLE, is it likely to work better just to rearrange
> space and coalesce it on one holding disk? My idea had been to share
> disks and trade part of this disk for part of another so that dumps
> could be using more than one spindle for holding space.
> 
> TIA
> 

-- 
Darin Perusich
Unix Systems Administrator
Cognigen Corporation
395 Youngs Rd.
Williamsville, NY 14221
Phone: 716-633-3463
Email: darinper AT cognigencorp DOT com