On Tue, 2005-08-16 at 07:46 -0700, Marc Perkel wrote: > A few quick thought. You can never have too much ram. As to raid, I'd > just use Raid 1 - it's faster than raid 5. If you're running Linux I > like the reiser file system for email because it has unlimited inodes. > As to CPU - if you are running spam filtering especially spamassassin > the good fast processing helps. If you want to save money I think the > new dual core Athlons from AMD would be very cost effective.
RAID 1 is faster if you don't have the CPU. But with a hardware RAID card, or basically any CPU made in the last five years, you should have enough power to perform the xor calculations needed to distribute the parity blocks. The RAID 1 is faster with reads, as they can be spread across the drives. But when writing to a RAID 1 array all data must hit all drives, so you are only as fast as the slowest drive in the array (most people just use two or three of the same drive, but still you are limited to the speed of that drive). With RAID 5 reads and writes are distributed across multiple drives. The more drives in the array the better the performance (up to the speed of the bus). There is an additional overhead of the parity data but it is minimal. -- Chris -- ## List details at http://www.exim.org/mailman/listinfo/exim-users ## Exim details at http://www.exim.org/ ## Please use the Wiki with this list - http://www.exim.org/eximwiki/
