[Dovecot] Maildir feature I'd like to see - SSD for newer messages

[Eric Rostetter]

Quoting Marc Perkel <marc at perkel.com>:

> Some new SSDs use SATA 3 (6gb/sec) with 355/mb/sec read speeds and  
> 215MB/sec write. Put these in raid 0 and it screams! Can you imagine  
> how fast that would be?

I'd never raid-0 anything important...

> What would be nice is if new email were on faster drives with old  
> email being migrated to larger mechanical cheaper storage. Perhaps  
> messages over a month old? From dovecot's perspective it would sort  
> of all look the same but maybe one a week a script would run  
> migrating older messages to slower media.

I used to do something "similar" in that the user's inbox was on fast
disk, and all their other folders (assumes IMAP for the most part) were
on slower disks.  A cronjob would run once a month that locks the inbox,
selects and mail older than 6 months, and moves it to a folder called
"old-mail" -- thus migrating any 6+ month old mail from fast to slow
storage...

I suppose you could adapt that, maybe with a shorter time period (1 month
would seem okay, not sure about anything shorter).

I know this isn't exactly what you want or asked for, but it is an idea
based on a past implementation which worked well.

> I'm not sure what it would take to make dovecot seamlessly access  
> email from two different locations or if this is practical. Just  
> wanted to throw the idea out there to see if something sticks.

Well, different folders make it a snap...  If you don't want to re-folder,
then it may not be so easy (I'll let someone else answer that).

-- 
Eric Rostetter
The Department of Physics
The University of Texas at Austin

Go Longhorns!