[toaster] RAID Recommendations for Toaster

[Jeff Koch]

Hi:
Does anyone have cost effective hardware recommendations for a single 
server qmail toaster in a production environment?

We have been having pretty good success with 2.8Ghz P4 servers with 1GB RAM 
and 80GB IDE or SATA drives running CentOS 3.4. We were concerned about the 
drives crashing so we tried the same setup with a 3ware IDE RAID card with 
RAID 1 mirroring. It was a total disaster. The RAID card could not keep up 
with the large number of small file reads and writes associated with qmail. 
90% of the CPU capacity was being wasted in the IOWAIT state and the queue 
built up to 20,000 emails.

We would very much like to protect the qmail server against hard crashes 
with RAID but now we don't know if it is possible. Has anyone had any 
success with hardware or software RAID in a high volume environment? If so, 
how did you do it?



Best Regards,

Jeff Koch