[K12OSN] hard drive SCSI vs IDE-opinions

cisna-barry at wc235.k12.il.us cisna-barry at wc235.k12.il.us
Wed Dec 21 16:32:26 UTC 2005


Hello List,

I was wanting to get opinions on the performance increase of going from
IDE to SCSI.interface. I've never had to worry much about this till
recently.
This school year I set up,,our own mail server (
Postfix/Dovecot/Squirrelmail/amavisd/clamav),, [works like a charm].. and
now that we have all staff members using it,we are running into the
following scenario.
The three secretaries mass email out dailey announcements( about 350
users). So,, after they mass email it pulls down the email server for
almost 10 mins.to were it is unaccessable.So hence as soon as this
happens,,,phone rings>>"email is down yada,,yada".
Actually it is only unaccesable for 30 mins,,out of the entire day,,,but
non the less i hear about it:(..
I can see at the server the HD is running non-stop for this 10 minute time
frame processing the outgoing emails.
Ive tryed to encourage the secs..to just copy/paste,,announcments into the
message body,,so as to not have attachemnts for the server to scan..but
not gonna happen,,i dont think.
This server does have onboard SCSI(promise) i beleive, but for some reason
( at the time),,I could not  get K12LTSP to install correctly with
SCCI,,enabled,,so i just cabled to the IDE interface.
What will I be up against if ( over xmas vacation)if  i merelry recable
the HD's to the SCSI interface/enable onboard SCSI, and reboot the box. Im
guessing im going to not be bootable,,with out manually reconfiguring GRUB
somehow?:(.
The server is:
1 gig single processor/Intel ,2 gig ram( maxed), dual 120 gig Hds
10/100 nics onboard, promise onboard SCSI TX-100( i think).
I did run the linux disk access utilty on each drive but can remember what
the numbers/speed were on this?
If i attempt this,does anyone think this will resolve this "pull down to
nothing" situation,,of the server /
I know there are values that can be altered,,in Postfix,,as far as max
processes,,etc,,,but Id like to leave these at defaults.
I'm sure someone out there has run into this same snafoo..

Thanks for any input,,,

Barry




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