Zimbra and Mac Mini with Firewire RAID

[DaleC]

Just curious, what do you think of this configuration and how many email accounts do you think it would support?
10
100
1000
10000?

Mac Mini 1.83 Core Duo
2 GB RAM
Lacie Firewire RAID 10 with 7200 RPM ATA 133 drives.

This is about a $2000 setup and I am curious how viable it would be.

Thanks

[brian]

From a performance and scalability perspective your limitation is going to be the FireWire 400 interface on the Mac Mini. It will only sustain about 35-40MB/sec no matter how many spindles you put behind it. This compares to 25-30MB for the internal 5400 RPM drive on sustained transfers. Obviously the 7200 RPM drives will be better for a mail system as well as the fact that you get some redundancy with the RAID.

I may be wrong but I thought that LaCie products did RAID 0+1 not RAID 10, there's a subtle difference in fault tolerance between the two.

Account scalability is obviously dependent on average usage and mail throughput, a rough guestimate would be less then 30 active users.

[DaleC]

Originally Posted by brian

From a performance and scalability perspective your limitation is going to be the FireWire 400 interface on the Mac Mini. It will only sustain about 35-40MB/sec no matter how many spindles you put behind it. This compares to 25-30MB for the internal 5400 RPM drive on sustained transfers. Obviously the 7200 RPM drives will be better for a mail system as well as the fact that you get some redundancy with the RAID.

I may be wrong but I thought that LaCie products did RAID 0+1 not RAID 10, there's a subtle difference in fault tolerance between the two.

Account scalability is obviously dependent on average usage and mail throughput, a rough guestimate would be less then 30 active users.

I think you are right about the 0+1

That is still good to know.
If ,for a 25 user office, a $200 setup would be sufficient, that would be awesome.
Also, if the Firewire bus was the bottlekneck, then maybe 2 drives in a software mirror would be better than the more expensive RAID cost-wise.

That would bring it down to under $1500.