AndrewJacksonZA (12/9/2010)

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Steve Jones - SSC Editor (12/9/2010)

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What does this tell you?

From a pure hardware point of view, NOT taking into consideration optimising the software like mu_rauer said, investigate RAIDing some SSDs.

Compare the ROI of optimising the emailing software vs. the ROI of a (few?) SSD array(s). You might want to look at OCZ's HSDL

About OCZ's HSDL:

better suited to workstations and the HPC market. Backing these projections are OCZ’s initial performance numbers. The company is claiming read and write speeds of up to 740 MB/s, and up to 120,000 IOPS. Those figures are insane. Clearly, they’re also in excess of what a single SAS or SATA interface could accommodate. And according to OCZ, this is only the first generation of the technology—it’s supposed to get faster from here.

You might also want to have a gander at this article entitled "How Do SSDs Redefine Storage Performance?". This is a comparison of two Samsung 470 SSDs vs. eight Fujitsu 15K RPM HDDs.

It is important to note that there are faster and somewhat more efficient hard drives available, which would have shifted the results a bit in favor of the hard drive arrays. Yet, the differences we see are significant enough to be sure that whatever you tweak on the hard drive side still cannot beat a fast and efficient SSD array. Also, we had to use the 15K RPM Fujitsu drives because no hard drive maker wanted to provide drives once we told them what we were planning. This alone should speak volumes.