3.5'' Vs. 2.5'' SAS HDDs: In Storage, Size Matters

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Diminutive 2.5” form factors are favored in the enterprise storage world for many reasons, but how do high-end 2.5” SAS drives compare to the established 3.5” products when it comes to performance and power? We requested some drives and did the analysis.

Test Setup And Transfer Diagrams

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
Motherboard (Socket 1366) Supermicro X8SAX; Revision: 1.1; Chipset: Intel X58 + ICH10R; BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
System HDD Seagate NL35 400GB ST3400832NS; 7,200 RPM, SATA 1.5Gb/s, 8MB Cache
Test HDDs 3.5” 15,000 RPM (Fujitsu MBA3147RC)2.5” 10,000 RPM (Toshiba MBF2600RC)
Power Supply OCZ EliteXstream 800W OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance Measurements h2benchw 3.12PCMark Vantage 1.0
I/O Performance Iometer 2006.07.27Fileserver-BenchmarkWebserver-BenchmarkDatabase-BenchmarkWorkstation-BenchmarkStreaming ReadsStreaming Writes
System Software & Drivers
Driver Details
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
Intel Chipset Chipset Installation Utility 9.1.0.1007
AMD Graphics Radeon 8.12
Intel Matrix Storage 8.7.0.1007