PST Sizes and architecture

[hortonhearsawho]

Hi,

can you tell me if exchange 2010 requires 64 bit hardware and what the maximum size of .pst can be created without corruption for it? Is it still 2 gigs, the same as exchange 2003? Thanks.

 

[58sniper]

Yes - 64 bit, as mentioned in all of the relevant product documentation. Exchange doesn't create .pst files. That's a client side feature (with the exception of exporting mailboxes). Additionally, network stored .pst files have NEVER been supported.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[zbnet]

Also remember, Exchange 2010 has some of the best features ever imagined that will ensure you can kill your PST files dead (remember, PST BAD).

Once your users have fast, responsive 2GB mailboxes, PSTs become kind of a moot point.

 

[hortonhearsawho]

I guess the question then is. I want to keep all emails on the server to the point of 50-100 gigs. Will exchange 2007 or 2010 be able to handle that and function efficiently without coming to a crawl and causing all kind of information store errors ?

 

[hortonhearsawho]

The pst file size of 2 gigs as you know is the limit given by msft before the file becomes corrupted . Is that an exchange 2003 limitation or pst limit as a whole regardless of which version 2007 or 2010?

 

[58sniper]

To answer your first question, yes. Quite easily. Of course, that requires proper planning of hardware resources including processors, RAM, and storage. FWIW, 100GB is *NOTHING*. I have departments that have stores larger than that, and servers that handle many times that.

For the second question, again, that's an Outlook issue. The "safe" size is <1.8GB. Later versions of Outlook support a newer type of .pst file that can be much larger. But the recommendation would always be to not use .pst files at all.

Pat Richard MVP
Plan for performance, and capacity takes care of itself. Plan for capacity, and suffer poor performance.

http://www.ucblogs.net/blogs/exchange/

 

[zbnet]

Exchange 2010 (and 2007 for that matter) will eat 100GB up for breakfast with barely a burp. Ex2010 especially has a rearchitected mailstore schema to allow it to efficiently handle very large information stores; and with modern 64-bit hardware running 32GB of memory (say), it can cache a significant proportion of the mailstore into physical memory for even greater efficiency.