Re: Best file location and disk configuration for Exchange 2003

On Wed, 1 Feb 2006 19:50:27 -0800, CajunTank
<CajunTank@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>I am installing a new Windows 2003 and Exchange 2003 server and have read 
>several articles regarding hard disks, IOP's, log and database file 
>locations. My situation will be new HP, DELL, does not matter server with 6 
>SCSI U320 hard drives. 2x36GB (RAID1) for the OS, 2x36GB (RAID1) for logs, 
>and 2x146GB (RAID1) for database. Economics and the fact that I will only 
>have about 300 users stopped anything more. I have also read about array 
>settings (adjusting the stripe size and increasing write caching) and NTFS 
>disk formatting tweaks. My question has to do with smtp queue, page file, 
>temp directory, and indexing file location. Given I have those 3 arrays, what 
>is the best placement for those files? Also, any benefit in partitioning up 
>the arrays for these files, or because they are still on the same logical 
>drive, it doesn't matter? Any help would be appreciated.

The three RAID1 sets are fine and given the user load i'd move the
"mailroot" directory (as per KB) to the array you have reserved for
the logs. The 300 users aren't going to hammer the 15k disks with log
files unless something goes wrong. Beauty is that you can move them
should you need without distrupting service to the users. Depending on
the amount of memory you have you might well leave the page file where
it is. As for partitioning I'd suggest you leave a nice big hole
somewhere so that you can do an offline defragmentation easily should
you need to. Obviously that's going to restrict the max store size so
you might be reduced to doing that task "off server" should it ever
come to it.

.

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