Disks generally maintain throughput in 20 GB chunks these days, which leaves you with plenty of wiggle room. When creating partitions, the system obviously goes first, then followed by your IMail Users and then your Spool. The other partitions on your system shouldn't be accessed with any degree of frequency if dedicated to just being a mail server, so you could dump your logs periodically on a fourth partition without harm to performance.

If you are running enough disks to give you enough I/O to outlive the processors, you don't have anything to worry about. I personally recommend RAID 5 despite the broad belief that RAID 10 is better. The reason is that you are limited in the number of drives that most servers can support, and you get better performance out of 6 drives in RAID 5 than you do with 6 drives in RAID 10. 6 Seagate Cheetah's at 15K RPM with write through cache can easily handle whatever Declude and IMail can throw at it on a dual 3GHz Xeon server. Two mirrored 10K drives however is a different story, and one would want to optimize as much as possible under that environment.

My recommendation would be to figure out your current average disk space per user and multiply that by the number of users that you expect 3 years out and then double that number to account for growth in the average and you should be safe. I don't personally recommend installing IMail outside of the C: drive, just separate out both the users to their own partition, and the spool to it's own partition, and unless you are using Kiwi, log everything to the spool partition and move the files to an archive location with a scheduled process in order to mitigate the fragmentation. There is not going to be a measurable difference in performance if you make your spool 1GB or 5GB, but there would definitely be a difference between 5GB and 50GB, so don't dedicate the space unless you have to. It's also nice to have unused space present in the event of future need.

I hope that helps explain at least my perspective on how to do this :)

Matt



sbsi lists wrote:

Hi Markus,

Interested in this too since I'm ramping up a new server install.

But, one question to Matt/David/Rick/All... (by the way, thanks!)

    How  do  you  handle  larger  mail  boxes/webmail/imap if you are
    keeping your /imail/ main directory/program files down to a lower
    disk space?

    I understand keeping the disk space down to a minimum but I don't
    understand  where  storage  would be if larger mailboxes/imap was
    allowed...

TIA. -jason

MG> So considering also Matt's reply:

MG> - Delete the existing 69 GB partition
MG> - Create the two small (and so faster) partitions with around 2 or 3 GB for
MG> Imail program files and Spool-folder
MG> - Create the last partition with all the remaining space to move out log-
MG> and hold-files from the spool folder.

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