Three 2.5" SAS Drives: Enterprise Data Giants, Compared

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Currently, 2.5" enterprise drives are leaving their 3.5” competitors behind. They're faster, more flexible, and now they offer comparable capacities (we're up to 1 TB now). In this piece, it's Hitachi versus Seagate battling for high-density supremacy.

Comparison Table, Test Configuration, And Transfer Diagrams

Comparison Table

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Manufacturer Hitachi Seagate Seagate
Family Ultrastar C10K600 Constellation.2 Savvio 10K.5
Model HUC106060CSS600 ST91000640SS ST9900805SS
Form factor 2.5“ 2.5“ 2.5“
Capacity 600 GB 1000 GB 900 GB
RPM 10 000 RPM 7200 RPM 10 000 RPM
Further capacities 450, 300 GB 250, 500 GB 600, 450, 300 GB
Platter 3 3 3
Cache 64 MB 64 MB 64 MB
Interface SAS 6Gb/s SAS 6Gb/s SAS 6Gb/s
Operating temperature 5-55 °C 5-60 °C 5-55 °C
No-load power according to spec 3.1 W 3.9 W 4.4 W
No-load power according to test 3.6 W 4.3 W 5.0 W
Operating shock (2 ms, Read) 60 G 70 G 40 G
Warranty 5 years 5 years 5 years

Test Setup

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (Bloomfield) (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8 MB L3 Cache)
Motherboard(Socket 1366) Supermicro X8SAX, Revision: 1.1, Chipset: Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3 x 1 GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
HDD Seagate NL35 400 GB, ST3400832NS, 7200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8 MB Cache
Storage Controller HighPoint Rocket 620, Marvell 88SE9128
PSU OCZ EliteXstream 800 W, OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance Measurements h2benchw 3.13 PCMark Vantage 1.0
I/O Performance IOMeter 2006.07.27 Fileserver-Benchmark Webserver-Benchmark Database-Benchmark Workstation-Benchmark Streaming Reads Streaming Writes
System-Software & Drivers
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate SP1

Transfer Diagrams

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2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • compton
    Toms with some more review niceness. Thanks for another interesting article. I don't think mechanical storage is going anywhere soon. For better and worse we'll still have it around for a long, long time to come. Even when SSDs hit that magical speed/capacity/cost point to be ubiquitous for mainstream consumers, enterprises will still need HDDs as part of their storage needs. HDDs are at least a known quantity that are still getting better.
    Reply
  • bit_user
    3rd paragraph: "have to be taken into considered". You also didn't mention capacity and cost/GB, where mechanical disks still reign supreme.

    Also, why not benchmark a 3.5" disk, but only use the outer portion. If both that and a 2.5" have the same density and rotational velocity, then the 3.5" should win due to higher I/O speeds resulting from higher linear velocity.
    Reply