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mmooss 2 days ago

> Outlook with multi-gigabye .pst files

What has been your experience? Mine in trying to use and support it is that Outlook is an Exchange client; PSTs are hacks to meet demand, though they work well enough in limited circumstances. Especially PSTs over a LAN connection are a disaster.

xnx 2 days ago | parent [-]

The Exchange server hardware was so underpowered (or the software so ill-designed for large mailboxes) that Exchange powered searches would fail, but ones run on the local pst would complete successfully (if slowly). This was on an HDD. SSD would be much faster.

mmooss 2 days ago | parent [-]

> This was on an HDD. SSD would be much faster.

OT but is that right? SSDs have many advantages but sequential read isn't necessarily one of them. SSDs seek is much faster, but this is ~one file. Throughput can be much faster due to the better interfaces, but is throughput the bottleneck for this kind of search?

toast0 2 days ago | parent | next [-]

SSDs are usually better at sequential read as well as seeks. Depending on how outlook organizes the file (and how it gets organized in the file system) there's probably a mix of seeking and sequential reads anyway.

xnx 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

Good question. Property benchmarking would be required to know for sure. It's probably rare that a multi-gigabyte file would be contiguous on disk, so lots of seeking would probably be required anyway.