Exchange Performance, Heavy Disk I/O and Entourage
If you are experiencing unexplained performance issues and heavy disk I/O on your exchange server and your environment supports Entourage then consider this. Entourage clients are different and do not use RCP or IMAP to communicate with Exchange. Entourage clients actually use HTTP (WebDAV) vs. IMAP.
Normally, I see disk I/O issues related to abnormal loads from SPAM, Viruses or hardware failures. Anyhow, Microsoft knowledge base article 329067 http://support.microsoft.com/kb/329067 contains additional information regarding this issue. Here is a personal experience documented by a systems administrator for further clarification/validation here: http://www.macwindows.com/041107d.html ( good perfmon recommendations here).
Additionally, entourage related administrator guides recommend careful organization of the client inbox and client storage policies on the exchange server. Multiple sub-folders within the users inbox as well as large attachments are not recommended for these clients. It might help to review the recommendations within kb-329067 as well as have your Mac users archive any old or unnecessary inbox items.
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