On Wednesday, March 16, 2005, 11:25:46 AM, Goran wrote: <snip/>
GJ> I guess this is going against what I think should be happening. In a GJ> RAID 5 array the write to the drives is broken into many smaller writes GJ> along with the data protection/CRC info and then those writes are GJ> written to different drives. It seems to me that it should be faster to GJ> do a bunch of small writes rather than 1 big write. GJ> What am I missing? Writing data to a single hard drive takes x amount of work. Writing data to more than one drive takes x+y amount of work where y is breaking up the data into chunks. Writing data to a raid 5 takes x+y+z amount of work where y is described above and z is calculating a CRC stripe which must now also be saved to a hard drive. So, writing to raid5 is relatively very expensive compared to writing to a plain old hard drive, or a less complex raid (such as mirroring). IMO, the best strategy for email servers is to use an ordinary, single fast HD for all spool operations, and place mailboxes on a raid 1 or raid 10. Hope this helps, _M 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
