Any network admins here?

[Papa_Complex]

Originally Posted by Homeslice

This is good info, thanks. I never really knew the physical differences between a server and a desktop, other than the fact that servers have this cool stackable format with rugged cases & blinking lights & shit. I didn't know the actual RPM was faster.

So the difference between Outlook and Exchange is that Outlook is just user-side software that manages an indiv. account, while Exchange is server-side software that manages how all the accounts interact with each other?

It's more than just RPM that makes things faster. You can get into things like 'striping' of data on the drives, which distributes the data from a single source across multiple disks. This means that while one disk is recovering from a seek operation and getting ready to read another discrete piece of data, another drive can already be doing so. This reduces latency periods between data reads and speeds overall disk performance.

Since disk reads are the slowest operation that takes place on a server, this can significantly reduce that particular performance bottleneck. That's where a good DBA comes in because location of data can have a big effect on overall access times.