Quoting Marc Perkel marc@perkel.com:
I just replaced my drives for Dovecot using Maildir format with a pair of Solid State Drives (SSD) in a raid 0 configuration. It's really really fast. Kind of expensive but it's like getting 20x the speed for 20x the price. I think the big gain is in the 0 seek time.
Here's what I bought.
Crucial RealSSD C300 CTFDDAC256MAG-1G1 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148349
* 2.5" * 256GB * SATA III
* *Sequential Access - Read:* 355MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) 265MB/sec (SATA 3Gb/s) * *Sequential Access - Write:* 215MB/sec (SATA 6Gb/s) 215MB/sec (SATA 3Gb/s) * *Power Consumption (Active):* 2.1W READ, 4.3W WRITE * *Power Consumption (Idle):* 0.094W
Running it on an Asus motherboard that supports SATA III - 6 core AMD CPU and 16 gigs of ram. Might be slightly off topic but this server screams! Hey Marc,
Just for testing purposes, what does a dd speed test give you?
http://it.toolbox.com/blogs/database-soup/testing-disk-speed-the-dd-test-310... IMHO, the key part is exceeding the RAM size, but for a "closer to Maildir" comparison, a decent file size that exceeds the drive cache is good too..
Rick