On Monday 22 January 2007 08:05, Matt wrote:
I am upgrading a very heavilly used email server to a AMD64 dual core with CentOS. I am staying with i386 since the web GUI we use lists 64bit support as beta and I do not want any problems. The real draw back I see is the max RAM on i386 but perhaps I am wrong. 90 percent of our CPU load is Spamassassin. Disk I/O is likely a big bottle neck as well. Currently we run 2 gigabyte of RAM but will likely move to 4G of DDR2 RAM. Moving from PATA to SATA drives as well.
SATA is better than PATA, but it pales compared to SCSI. Even with SATA, an rsync of a large directory tree can hammer the performance of a server, but with SCSI, it doesn't register enough, on a much busier server, to even notice!
So, evaluate if the $500 for a *good* disk subsystem is actually worth it - in my case, the answer is a resounding.... YES!!!!