I'm setting up a new mail server with 8x ST373455SS 15K.5 drives and the new Adaptec 5805 RAID card. What are some recommendations for stripe size when configuring my RAID setup? Note: I was going through the users folders and noticed that about 75% of the mail is less than 64K in size. Would it be better to configure the stripe size at 32 or 64K, or should I use the default of 256K? Other options are 16K, 128K, 512K, and 1MB.
Mail servers generally store the mail in a large database file that is usually read/written in pages that are smaller than 64K (I believe Exchange uses 8K pages). For that case, smaller stripe sizes would be better, as it would allow a better write combining hit rate.
I would choose 64K.
--------------- - SomeJoe7777
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