devel anaconda put forth on 11/6/2009 12:18 AM: > This is an 1U PowerEdge server with 4 slots for SCSI disks
Ouch, 4 disks is very limiting. Given that the spool files are temporary in nature, your best option short of purchasing a new server or an external SCSI array enclosure, is to add two more disks as an mdadm RAID 0 (striping only, no data protection), and move the postfix spool to that volume. That will give you a 2x increase in spool throughput, which might not be enough additional throughput for you. If one of the RAID 0 disks fails, you lose your spool. Unlikely, but it happens. A better option would be to migrate to a new 2U or 3U server with more disk bays (and disks), or get something like this, which is much less than a new server: http://cgi.ebay.com/Dell-PowerVault-220S-14x36GB-U320-SCSI-Array-Enclosure_W0QQitemZ380068671603QQcmdZViewItemQQptZLH_DefaultDomain_0?hash=item587ddbb073 Used external SCSI disk arrays are pretty cheap today, such as the one above at Ebay. It comes with a PCI RAID card, cables, and rails. If you choose not to use the RAID card but plain SCSI and mdadm instead, you can just cable to the external SCSI connector on the back of your current server (which you said is SCSI, not SAS, so it should have a SCSI connector on back). Anyway, with this particular array, configured by you as RAID 10, you'd get 7 spindles worth of throughput (14/2 due to RAID 10) and roughly 250GB of space for your spool. 250GB may seem small given the cost and availability of 500GB SATA disks, but you're after speed not size, and the only way to get it is lots of disks. The ad doesn't say if these are 7.2, 10, or 15K RPM disks, but even if only 7.2K RPM, these seven spindles would still give you around a 4x-5x throughput increase over what you currently have, especially if you use the included PERC4/DC RAID card. If you get something like this, put the spool on it, and any other disk intensive stuff like user mail dirs, assuming all this mail traffic is destined to local users. If you do upgrade some hardware to solve this issue, please let us know what you do. Hope this info helps you out. -- Stan **DISCLAIMER**: I'm not plugging this particular Ebay item. I have no connection to it. I'm just using this gear as an example as it is the same brand as his server, meets the OP's needs and is relatively inexpensive.
