[ale] Needing to cut up server disk space

[Jeff Hubbs]

I am about to get "regifted" a Dell server at work which I am told will 
have five 400GB SAS drives. I plan to turn this into a Gentoo Linux 
server into which lab staff will shell to do whatever, and I expect I 
may have a PostgreSQL instance running there as well.

I'd like some suggestions as to the most admin-friendly way to deal with 
the five drives given that:

  * I really dislike hardware RAID cards like Dell PERC. If there has to
    be one, I would much rather set it to JBOD mode and get my RAIDing
    done some other way.
  * I foresee I will have gnashing of teeth if I set in stone at install
    time the sizes of the /var and /home volumes. There's no telling how
    much or how little space PostgreSQL might need in the future and you
    know how GRAs are - give them disk space and they'll take disk space. :)

I can go kernel raid, I can go LVM if I have to, I can go btrfs if I 
want to - or, you can talk me out of my PERC hate. I know that at 
5x400GB I could RAID5 that stack easily in hardware and then use LVM or 
btrfs from there, but I wanted to see if anyone had a suggestion as to 
how to proceed starting from JBOD that would be about as easy to live with.

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