I have one of the smaller shuttle boxes with only 1 hard drive slot. I also have 2 Firewire dual drive cases. I was looking at LVM to extend the space for my DVDs, but I was wondering if I LVM could do this:

Can I use my normal HD for the /mythtv space and power down the firewire boxes when I don't want them running? Sort of like a dynamic drive? I want to keep my main DVDs on my box, but I would also like to be able to "flip the switch" on the firewire boxes to get my entire library.

I am Googling for some LVM answers now, but I was hoping someone had a quick thumbs up/thumbs down on doing this.

Thinking here, after googling a bit.

Not sure how this might work, but...how about for the one drive scenario:

1. Create a script that automounts the firewire drive on connection.
2. Create a script to unmount the firewire drive when run.
3. In the script, make the mount point /myth/video? Mount points are directories, so without the external drive, you'd have your often used videos in /myth/video and with the external drive, you'd have all your videos. My understanding is that if the directory has contents, they'll just be unavailable until the volume is unmounted.

You'd probably always want to rip while the drive is online, then copy the files you always want available elsewhere on /myth, unmount the drive, and move them back to /myth/video.

You can, of course, expand the scripts to handle the firewire drives as an LVM volume in addition to the mount issue, but mounting might always be manual.

-brendan