SATA 10k or SATA II 7200?

[monsterjta]

Will a disk actually utilize the 3gbs interface offered by SATA II? I'm planning a high performance system, and am unsure whether to go for fast RPM or fast interface. I'm not willing to pay the price for SATA II 10k disks, since I'm installing 16 disks and creating a RAID 10. That would cost way too much. So I need to sacrifice either interface speed or rpm. The big question is, what would provide more performance in a 16-disk RAID 10 configuration? SATA 10k or SATA II 7200 (but with the 3gbs interface)?

 

[N.Broekhuijsen]

Sata goes up to 300MB/s, Sata 2 goes up to 3gb/s

I would go for the 7200 drives as they are more reliable, and with a 16 disk setup im pretty sure you will get transfer speeds of over 300MB/s

With one or two drives Sata 1 is enough, but with many disks I would be sure to go for sata 2.

The RPM difference is not worth the money and risk of crashing for most of us. 7200 drives these days are more than fast enough.

 

[Pailin]

If you are after a high performance system, why not got for the new 6GB/s SATA interface (does seem to help this new drive achieve a good improvement over the 3GB/s interface) with a few of the new C300 Crucial SSD's which will apparently do sequential read of 355MB/s and Read of 215MB/s.

It also has Great 4k random writes and reads - beating easily the Intel X25-M.

See:

Anand Preview

So a Single drive is

Some new RAID controllers support RAID with TRIM too if you are after Crazy performance!!!
These drives are available in Feb and come with a 5 year warranty.

 

[Pailin]

That was obviously meant to read:

C300 can do a sequential
Read of 355MB/s
and
Write of 215MB/s.

Not long now till we see some real reviews done back in the labs.
Is shipping to distributers near the end of this month, available to buy 1st half of next month

 

[Shadow703793]

@OP:

Why do you need 16 drives? Is this for a file server/NAS? If you plan to do RAID, go with the Samsung F3s they have quite high sequential read/writes. HOWEVER, if you want good random read/writes go with 10k rpm drives.

@Pailin: It's too early to tell. Those benches on the C300 were run on an unused disk. As you know, SSD benches tend to be a LOT different once the SSD gets used up.

 

[damian86]

you can find sataII hard disks with high performance, check the western digital black or blue series,7200 rpm.
keep on mind that 10k rpm hdds get hot, and most of them offer you less capacity than the 7200 rpm's.
those WD's in RAID will run as fast as a raptor.

 

[monsterjta]

@OP:

Why do you need 16 drives? Is this for a file server/NAS? If you plan to do RAID, go with the Samsung F3s they have quite high sequential read/writes. HOWEVER, if you want good random read/writes go with 10k rpm drives.

@Pailin: It's too early to tell. Those benches on the C300 were run on an unused disk. As you know, SSD benches tend to be a LOT different once the SSD gets used up.

This 16-disk system will have a couple purposes, so I'll be creating a couple arrays.

(1) I need performance to run iSCSI target for several VM's in my lab. Also, I'll be hosting a couple OLTP databases here, and these disks will host the DB's in a clustered configuration. I plan on configuring a RAID 10 for the first 8 10k disks for these performance reasons, and capacity is not my goal here.

(2) I will be creating a RAID 5 out of the other 8 disks, which will be high capacity 7200RPM disks. Don't need the performance here, as capacity is the goal for this second array.

 

[monsterjta]

Sata goes up to 300MB/s, Sata 2 goes up to 3gb/s

I would go for the 7200 drives as they are more reliable, and with a 16 disk setup im pretty sure you will get transfer speeds of over 300MB/s

With one or two drives Sata 1 is enough, but with many disks I would be sure to go for sata 2.

The RPM difference is not worth the money and risk of crashing for most of us. 7200 drives these days are more than fast enough.

I think SATA is 1.5gb/s and SATA II is 3gb/s. Besides, isn't this based on per interface? If I have a 16 port SATA II controller, the potential throughput would be 16x3gb/s...right? Otherwise, what is the purpose of having a 16 port controller?

 

[Pailin]

@ Shadow703793

@Pailin: It's too early to tell. Those benches on the C300 were run on an unused disk. As you know, SSD benches tend to be a LOT different once the SSD gets used up.

True, but so were the ones on the Intel 😉

The newer tech drives have Much better internal organisation and don't fully need TRIM anymore in some cases to remain in good order.

But we shall see in a few weeks once they get into the hands of testers who can simulate used drives etc. Am looking forward to seeing the truth of these new drives!

 

[ab0tj]

What xbeater said here is mostly hogwash. SATA is 150MB/s and SATAII is 300MB/s. Or 1.5/3Gbps, depending on how you look at it. He's comparing bits to bytes there. And as far as reliability goes, any 10k drive is most likely going to be server grade hardware, hence more reliable and faster than 7200rpm drives. And yes, the bandwidth is per port. Not many mechanical drives can saturate a SATA inteface let alone SATAII.

 

[monsterjta]

Best answer selected by monsterjta.

 

[monsterjta]

What xbeater said here is mostly hogwash. SATA is 150MB/s and SATAII is 300MB/s. Or 1.5/3Gbps, depending on how you look at it. He's comparing bits to bytes there. And as far as reliability goes, any 10k drive is most likely going to be server grade hardware, hence more reliable and faster than 7200rpm drives. And yes, the bandwidth is per port. Not many mechanical drives can saturate a SATA inteface let alone SATAII.

I ended up getting a great deal on a set of SATA II, 10k disks, so the question is mute at this point, but thanks for the feedback. But, really, to answer the question from the original post, and given the feedback here, I conclude that faster disks, even if they are SATA I only, would not saturate even the 1.5gbps interface. So, had I not landed a sweet deal on these SATA II 10k disks, I probably would have went with SATA I 10k disks rather than SATA II 7200RPM disks.

Thanks everyone.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey