>With the advent of these huge drives, whats the concensus using NT4, in
>partitioning the drives.
>
>Example, an 18 gig scsi..most of you make it one drive letter.
I don't know what the consensus is, if there is one, but I'd be surprised
if it was recommending 18 gigabyte partitions. So I recommend not doing 18
gigs/partion, since typically you'll have 10's ,maybe 100's, of 1000's of
files, and fragging will be horrendous and de-fragging will be much more
difficult. Buy two drives, they're cheap.
>.. or break it
>up into several partitions (btw, it's the second drive in the server for
>data storage).
I do this:
c: sys (OS only never explicitly install proggies in there)
d: swap (never install anything in there) keeps the swap file contiguous
and unfragmented. 3 times max/eventual RAM size
e: progs
f: data
Unfortuantely, MS's NT systems designers couldn't foresee the use for more
than 4 filesystems per physical drive, so if you need more data partitions
within the limit four, I'd fold the swap partition into C:
c: sys + swap
d: progs
e: data1
f: data2
Also, DO NOT create "virtual partitions" by network-sharing the local NT
directories. Acessing local disk directories via MS Networking as network
drives is much slower than accessing local disks directly as local disks,
to say nothing of the CPU cycles wasted to execute all that network code.
For Imail's highly multiprocessed system, multiple disks are better. One
disk can be seeking queue files, and one disk can be seeking mailbox files.
"Disk one" has Imail root directory the Imail\spool queue directory (say in
the "data" partition above) which is a very busy directory because of all
msgs in/out get written here, plus the log files. No Imail domains should
go here.
"Disk two" for all Imail domains, ie, the mailboxes, the other major i/o
activity, reading/writing msgs to mailboxes.
If you're using IDE, put these two disks on separate IDE channels (as is
available on most recent motherboards), and disconnect the CDROM (hook it
up as needed, which is almost never on a dedicated Imail server. Copy your
NT cdrom \i386 to progs partition, and service packs come over the net)
since slave devices slow down the IDE/ATA channel. Really dumb to have an
idle cdrom eating up disk channel bandwidith while not being used 99.999%
of the time. And use DMA, not PIO mode. PIO is expensive in CPU cycles,
bad deal in a server.
Len
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