Hitachi Ships Industry's Fastest 10K RPM HDD

[mapesdhs]

blarneypete writes:
> Velociraptor is fast, but I wager when you throw it in as a
> contender against proper server-class SAS drives, it will lose
> by a fair margin

Correct! I wanted fast storage, but I need a lot of space aswell
(video); SSDs are still too expensive at such capacities, so 2 x
450GB 15K SAS in RAID0 was a nice compromise. A normal 1TB SATA
acts as a clone backup unit.

I recently tested some of the better SAS models, eg. the Seagate
450GB 15K ST3450857SS. Even just with a normal 3Gbit SAS connection,
it's way faster than a WD VR 150GB 10K SATA. See my page:

http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/diskdata.html

I've yet to run my access time test on the SAS drives though, not
had the time.

Note that for sequential I/O, even a normal 7200rpm 1TB SATA (eg.
Samsung Spinpoint F3) can be faster than a WD VR (the F3 has a
faster maximum but slower minimum). The VR's access time is its
main advantage, but except for SSDs nothing can match 15K SAS,
especially in RAID (I've yet to test more than 2 SAS drives in
this way). I'd be intrigued to know though how Hitachi's new drive
compares to the WD VR for access time; so far, the WD VR has
beaten every 10K SCSI I've tested, though it's surprising how well
some of the older models perform, eg. a Fujitsu 9GB 10K SCA was
only a little slower than the WD VR.

Ian.

PS. I have some spare 450GB 15K SAS drives for sale if anyone's
interested. See: http://www.sgidepot.co.uk/sgidepot/partsspares.html#SAS

 

[cookoy]

it ain't fatest until Tom's HW guys benchmarked it and say it is so. but the specs look really enticing.

 

[extremepcs]

15k RPM SAS ftw.

 

[Wamphryi]

Velicoraptors are no match for a good SAS setup but again we come back to the money and real world performance. The Velicoraptor and this new Hitachi are well positioned for the budget minded enthusiast. There are many issues that must be considered. For instance with RAM configurations hitting 4, 8 and 12 GB running Superfetch the HDD performance is not as critical as it used to be. Even running 4 GB RAM my systems barely hit the swap file these days. When I run Video Editing Software (Consumer Level) the software itself is the bottleneck. On my i series computers there is no bottleneck to be found at a hardware level and the Velicoraptors are not even close to their peak performance. The RAM is not Hard Faulting and the Processors are cruising along. The modern PC is well equipped to deal with 32 bit applications and it is only when more 64 bit software comes out that the gap between hardware and software capability will reduce. It is true that the SSD can beat the Velicoraptor. The thing is I am not prepared to hand over money so that MS Word or Fallout 3 will load a split second faster. Total Cost of Ownership and Real World Performance are the true benchmarks of PC performance in my opinion.

 

[scogar]

The point is moot... If you use a SSD for your boot & OS, you will be amazed at seeing IE8-9 open instantly, Windows boots up in around 15 seconds, and there simply is no-noise. Given this, why would one pick up a 10K RPM drive at a higher cost than 7200's just for media file storage ?

 

[Wamphryi]

Ok well I timed the boot time of my i5 (which boots exactly at the same speed as my i7) and 17 seconds was consumed by the BIOS alone. The time Windows took once the BIOS had finished was 23 seconds. All Office Applications including IE are loading in well under a second. Now if we look at the cost $345 NZ dollars gets me a 300 GB Velicoraptor. A 240 GB SSD with a decent Brand Name costs $1024 NZ. So for the price of one SSD I can have 3 300 GB Velicoraptors in RAID 0 which puts out some serious benchmarks and I have 900 GB in storage. The Velicoraptors have better seek times than 7200 RPM drives and sustain very respectable transfer rates that never drop no matter how large the files. My 7200 RPM drives average 40 MB second while the Velicoraptors are hitting 120 MB a second sustained. That kind of performance gain is to good to ignore but is achieved at a much more reasonable cost than the SSD options currently available.

 

[xxsk8er101xx]

Completely missing the point. Some times speed is not required where space is. There are very very few reasons to have fast speeds where SSD's are required. Typically a 24x 300GB - 15k drives on a SANs is plenty fast. So you have space, spindle speed, and redundency. Where as SSD's is strictly speed and not space. With 15k SAS drives you got the best of both worlds which is usually required.

Typically a corporation either needs speed and space or space and not speed. It's rearely the case where speed and not space is required. Typically they would just setup a 4GB RAM drive if speed is required.

 

[Wamphryi]

As well as the fact that SSD does not satisfy Corporate requirements, the SSD is a liability for anyone who has an OS that does not support TRIM. The 10000 RPM SATA drive offers usable speed, reasonable capacity at a reasonable price that satisfies the criteria defined by Total Cost of Ownership. If one is running a Server with a large number of users then the SAS option is available offering the advantages described by xxsk8er101xx. The 10000 RPM drives sit in the sweet spot where they offer good value for Gamers, Power Users and Small Server Operators. On that basis the SATA HDD in its 7200 RPM and its 10000 RPM variants will be around for a considerable amount of time yet.

 

[kelemvor4]

[citation][nom]gmarsack[/nom]Databases. No way are SSD (currently) going to survive the random reads/writes of a large database with multiple connections. SSD's are not designed for this application. Other than that though, not much.... lol[/citation]
Yup, nail on the head. I just ordered two new dell r910's this week for DB servers and wanted to consider SSD's as disk IO is a major consideration in these builds; however current generation SSD's just aren't close to being able to do the job.

[citation][nom]Marco925[/nom]Some people aren't so capable of maintaining an SSD drive. they wouldn't know to move the random read-write operations to a platter drive, for those types of people, it's perfect.[/citation]
I guess you could install your database application files and OS files on the ssd, but who really cares if a server boots 30 seconds quicker? That might save 2 or 3 minutes a year. Your database containers shouldn't be there unless performance is SO critical you can justify replacing SSD's every month or so. In which case, I'd get a bigger box with sufficient ram to store everything in memory. Dell's r910 will take up to 1Tb of ram for a pretty decent price.

In other enterprise locations, write demands aren't so critical (web server for example); but then disk IO shouldn't be hugely important there either (power might be a more compelling reason to use SSD in this case).

 

[kelemvor4]

[citation][nom]Wamphryi[/nom]As well as the fact that SSD does not satisfy Corporate requirements, the SSD is a liability for anyone who has an OS that does not support TRIM. [/citation]
AFAIK there's no way to do TRIM and RAID simultaneously at the moment. That pretty much means no trim in any enterprise environment.