Server with largish disks

[Keith Woodworth]

We are looking at putting in a newish server to replace an aging one.

Its a POP3/Webmail machine, running BSD/OS

One I'd like has 4 x 9gig and 4 x 18gig drives, 2 x 733mhz cpus.

Only have about 2500+ active mail accounts on this machine but it is
running low on space and we have lots of those accounts being access'd via
Openwebmail.

Mail spool is /var/mail

Question is what would be a good way to partition the drives in the above
configuration?

I would like acutally to use 3 x 18 gig drives as /var with the 4th
as the hotspare and the rest of the file systems (/ /usr) on 3 x 9gig
with the 4th as hotspace.

Is this a workable way to do it? Also since this has dual cpu's, how is
the SMP support in FBSD 5.2? ie: how stable is it?

Will the OS take advantage of having the two cpu's? Or would that depend
on the software (Postfix, Qpopper (though that maybe replaced) ) to use
the xtra cpu?

Thanks,
Keith