Install Hard Drives by Side, Upside-Down, Regular and Vertical Position

Install Hard Drives by Side, Upside-Down, Regular and Vertical Position

Does mounting a hard disk drive on its side or even upside-down affects its lifespan or reliability? According to every drive manufacturer, it’s perfectly acceptable to mount a hard disk drive in any orientation as long as it’s not tilted and has sufficient cooling.

Each drive manufacturer says on the subject of drive mounting:

1. Seagate: “All Seagate and Maxtor-brand hard drives can be fitted sideways or upside down. As long as they are not moved during use and get enough cooling, it is irrelevant in which direction they are mounted.”
2. Western Digital: “The drive can be mounted sideways, on end, or even upside down as long as the mounting screws are used properly.”
3. HGST: “Hitachi Deskstar drive can be mounted with any side or end vertical or horizontal. Do not mount the drive in a tilted position.”

So it’s perfectly fine to mount a hard disk drive upside down, vertical, or on either end as long as it’s secure from vibration and shock, not tilted at an angle, and gets enough cooling. This is no surprise since every vendor sells external USB drives with vertical or end-on mounting.

Difference Between RAID & LVM

DIFFERENCE BETWEEN RAID AND LVM

RAID

1.    RAID is used for redundancy.

2.    A RAID device is a physical grouping of disk devices in order to create a logical presentation of one device to an Operating System for redundancy or performance or a combination of the two.

3.    RAID is a way to create a redundant or striped block device with redundancy using other physical block devices.

4.    RAID is either a software or a hardware technique to create data storage redundancy across multiple block devices based on required RAID levels.

5.    RAID is NOT any kind of Data backup solution. Its a solution to prevent one of the SPOFs (Single Point of Failure) i.e. DISK failure. By configuring RAID you are just providing an emergency substitute for the Primary disk. It NEVER means that you have configured DATA backup.

LVM

1.    LVM is a way in which you partition the hard disk logically and it contains its own advantages.

2.    LVM is a logical layer that that can be anipulated in order to create and, or expand a logical presentation of a disk device to an Operating System.

3.    LVM usually sits on top of RAID blocks or even standard block devices to accomplish the same result as a partitioning, however it is much more flexible than partitions. You can create multiple volumes crossing multiple physical devices, remove physical devices without loosing data, resize the volumes, create snapshots, etc

4.    LVM is a software tool to manage large pool of storage devices making them appear as a single manageable pool of storage resource. LVM can be used to manage a large pool of what we call Just-a-bunch-of-Disk (JBOD) presenting them as a single logical volume and thereby create various partitions for software RAID.

5.    LVM is a disk management approach that allows us to create, extend, reduce, delete or resize the volume groups or logical volumes.