Hello Matt, Wednesday, March 16, 2005, 11:44:08 PM, you wrote:
M> I would just RAID 5 the whole setup. With your 6 drives, you M> get the read performance of 4 drives on any partition in this M> setup, plus you have a hot spare, and the write performance of M> close to 4 drives as well. This is a lot better than your config M> with a mirrored set of drives and a RAID 5 array that reads and M> writes at about the capacity of two. You will definitely get more M> bang for your buck with it all being one RAID 5 array, and you get M> much better redundancy that way as well. M> As far as splitting things up, there are only 4 things that I feel need to be separate: M> 1) OS and Executables M> 2) Spool M> 3) Mail Boxes M> 4) Log File Archive I have to agree with Matt, I run a single RAID 5 array with 7, 7200 RPM SATA disks for my mail server, and I see between 250K and 325K daily messages. My main differences are, I use a 3Ware EIDE RAID card for a RAID 1 on two 80GB disks for OS and Software, the big RAID is for Spool, Mailboxes and Logs, and I delete logs after 10 days. In almost 9 years of running an ISP, I have had only a couple of instances of needing logs beyond 3 or 4 days. When you only have a 3 disk RAID 5 I can definately see that there is a write performance hit, but that is why your RAID controller has a processor and cache, a good RAID controller can minimize the hit. On a larger array, say 6 drives, your data is split into 4 data blocks and 2 parity blocks, so the same write operation is twice as fast, you have twice as many spindles, no major disadvantage to the original proposal of a 3 disk RAID 5, 2 disk RAID 1, and single store disk, but you gain an added level of redundancy. I would throw a little bit of money into RAM and forget worrying so much about a paging partition, I have 2GB of RAM and only use a total of about 250MB RAM and Paging, with a very occasional jump to 500MB when things go wrong. Most anything in the Page file will not have any critical performance impact on your system. If you don't already have the drives and controller, you can also look at the Western Digital Raptor SATA disks, they are the only 10,000 RPM SATA disks. I also like the #Ware controllers, mine is the 8000 series, but 9000 series should be out now, and have a considerable performance edge. -- Best regards, Charles mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] This E-Mail came from the Message Sniffer mailing list. For information and (un)subscription instructions go to http://www.sortmonster.com/MessageSniffer/Help/Help.html
