Facts about Disk Management Now

Beginning with the 10.0 release of HP-UX, disks are managed identically on Series 800 and Series 700 systems.

On both the Series 800 and Series 700, using logical volumes is recommended as the preferred method for managing disks.

Existing hard partitioned disks from the Series 800 and non-partitioned disks from the Series 700 continue to be supported under release 10.01 (except for SDS disks; see below).

Hard partitions are provided only for models of disks that were supported prior to release 10.0. Hard partitions will not be provided on disks introduced with 10.0 or later.

You will not be able to use a partitioned disk for your root disk. You will only be able to use a non-partitioned disk or LVM disk for this purpose.

Although the use of logical volumes is encouraged, disks on both the Series 800 and Series 700 can also be managed as non-partitioned disks, or with hard partitions for those disk models that support hard partitions.

Existing disks that are non-partitioned or that have hard partitions can be converted to use logical volumes. (See "Converting Current Disks to New LVM Disks" later in the chapter.)

Both LVM disks and non-LVM disks can exist simultaneously on your system, but a given disk must be managed entirely by either LVM or non-LVM methods. That is, you cannot combine these techniques for use with a single disk.

The disk striping capabilities of Software Disk Striping on the Series 700 are no longer supported beginning at 10.0 and have been replaced by disk striping on logical volumes. Existing arrays of disks that made use of SDS are automatically converted to use logical volumes during the upgrade process. See Chapter 8 "Disk Striping Using LVM" for more information.

You should note that although hard disk drives and disk arrays support the use of logical volumes, floppy disks, optical disks, and CD ROMs do not.