sendmail Performance Tuning

4.5. Solid State Disks

Although Gordon Moore’s law postulates that CPU power for the same amount of money doubles every 18 months, disk access speeds have not kept up with this torrid pace. In 1994, a state-of-the-art disk had a capacity of about 2GB, the platters revolved at 5,400 rpm, and the disk had an average seek time of 10.4 ms. Larger disks were available, but they were fairly error-prone and not suitable for mission-critical work. In 1997, disk capacity was about 9GB, rotational speed was 7,200 rpm, and seek time averaged about 7.4 ms. In early 2002, a state-of-the-art disk for email systems means 36GB, 15,000 rpm, and 3.8 ms seek time. Larger disks are available, but at this time, these configurations are the disks of choice for email ...