sendmail Performance Tuning

4.4. Disks

When setting up an email storage system, it’s important not to overlook the most critical component—the disk drives themselves. The disks that work best for email storage have fast platter rotation rates and very low seek times. Disk capacity is far less important. In fact, it’s difficult to find appropriately small disks for most email systems. For very high I/O environments, there’s no substitute for having large numbers of spindles. In general, buy the smallest and fastest (especially as measured by seek time) disks available. This choice isn’t cost-effective in terms of megabytes per dollar, but it is cost effective in terms of I/O operations per dollar, the really important metric. These days, no matter how small the disk, expect ...