Will SSDs Take Over The Enterprise?

Seagate Savvio 10K.2, 2.5” SAS at 10,000 RPM

Seagate’s Savvio is a family of 2.5” enterprise class hard drives. Unlike the Cheetah drives, which are 3.5” models, the Savvio fits into the smaller 2.5” form factor. This allows for much higher storage densities when looking at I/O performance per unit of vertical rack space, and sometimes also for greater transfer performance density.

All Savvio hard drives are equipped with 16 MB of cache memory, 300 Mb/s SAS interfaces, and run at a spindle speed of 10,000 RPM, which delivers transfer rates of 91 MB/s maximum and 49 MB/s minimum. The 7.6 ms access time we measured is clearly superior to all desktop class hard drives. However, the MemoRight Flash SSDs come in at approximately 0.1 ms access time, which is only a fraction, and they deliver a constant 114 MB/s read and 104 MB/s write throughput.

Savvio Has Capacity Benefits

The Savvios are available either at 73 GB or at 146 GB, which clearly beats the capacity of the MemoRight Flash SSDs shipping in 32 GB or 64 GB, with a 128 GB version ready soon. And of course, the Savvio beats the pants off these Flash SSDs when it comes to cost per gigabyte. If this is important to you, drop the idea of purchasing flash-based hard drives right now.

Flash Crows Thanks to Multiplied I/O Performance

Look at the benchmark section to see the performance delta between eight Savvio 10K.2 73 GB drives in RAID as opposed to eight MemoRight 64 GB Flash SSDs in RAID. Since the access time and I/O performance of the flash SSDs are amazing, the devastating defeat of the Savvio drives in the I/O and transfer performance benchmarks doesn’t come as a surprise. Let’s look at what the faster Cheetah 15K.5 can do.