>I am looking at purchasing the Promise SuperTrak100 for one of my clients.
Wrong super track, you want the SX6000, or the Adaptec 2400a. www.highpoint.com does the chips and has some boards,. BUT the key to speed is the 128 mb for the RAID cache, and the INtel 960 processor. > They are going to run Imail and after reading everything in this forum > this is how I suggested to setup the machine. The Supertrack100 is a six > channel controller so: > >1. 1 Channel for OS/IMail Raid 1 os partition progs partition imail dedicated spool partition (keep this as unpopulated as possbile by zipping and moving all log files to another machine daily, ispclean to keep the old junk pruned. and defrag it, too. or move, reformat, unmove) OS dedicated swap partition (other partitions have no swap. or IIRC, MS OS wants to find at least some >2. The other two channels would be Raid 0+1 User Mail Boxes if there are multiple domains, create multiple partitions, and spread the domains among the partitions. use huge disks for the mailboxes to always have plenty of free space, so you can defrag at speed. a cheap way to defrag is to have a big spare disk on the system, xcopy a mailbox partition to the spare disk, reformat the mailbox partition, xcopy the from the spare disk to the mailbox partition. this kind of operation goes pretty fast if you keep your partitions "reasonably" and manageably sized. >Is this the best way for most performance Speed? within the mailbox server, yes. > Where would you suggest to store the spool/logging? on its own dedicated parition, on disk separate from the mailbox disk. > What would you guys recommend (IDE RAID) for the hard disk > setup? Looking at about 20,000 user accounts? Need something for future > use, client doesn't want to go with scsi. sure, these new 960-based ATA RAID boards with 128 megs of cache can save you $100's and $100's in SCSI drive costs. The key point is that the CPU is no longer being chewed up by ATA micro-operations (thanks for vision, Compaq) but the 960 Sweats the Small Stuff and greatly liberates the CPU for other CPU chores like webmail. And put 1 gb RAM in the box and hope that stupid OS won't swap gratuitously, which eats both CPU and disk throughput. Len http://MenAndMice.com/DNS-training http://BIND8NT.MEIway.com : ISC BIND 8.2.4 for NT4 & W2K http://IMGate.MEIway.com : Build free, hi-perf, anti-abuse mail gateways Please visit http://www.ipswitch.com/support/mailing-lists.html to be removed from this list. An Archive of this list is available at: http://www.mail-archive.com/imail_forum%40list.ipswitch.com/
