OLTP And Email Server Workloads
To read more on our test methodology visit How We Test Enterprise HDDs, which explains how to interpret our charts. We cover workload performance measurements on page four, latency measurements on page five and power measurements on page six.
Intense server workloads with transactional data are, admittedly, going to be a rare use case for these drives (unless users deploy them into existing architectures). HDDs continue to dominate in terms of overall storage capacity, but SSDs have overtaken the drives for most transactional workloads with new systems. However, examining mixed workload performance provides additional insight into the agility of the drive.
The HGST drives continue to display reduced performance during heavy workloads. The Seagate and HGST 10TB drives offer similar performance during the lighter portions of the workloads, which is the most important section of the test. We also note a bit of separation between the WD Gold and the He8, with the He8 offering a better performance profile.
Once again, we note that the HGST He10 suffers a performance reduction under heavy workloads in the latency over IOPS and QoS charts. However, it leads under light conditions with a higher peak output, which indicates that HGST has specifically tuned the drive for the more common workloads.
The power testing during the workload doesn't reveal any surprises; it is the same trend that we observed during the other tests.
The HGST He10 and Seagate 10TB continue to be closely matched during the lighter portions of the workload, but the Seagate pulls ahead as intensity increases beyond QD64. The two drives offer nearly the same performance under the lightest workloads, as seen in the latency subcharts, but the HGST offers the advantage of a higher peak performance at QD64. The He10 also offers a superior profile during the 32QD QoS breakout.
Surprisingly, the 12Gb/s SAS He10 pulls within a watt of the SATA 6Gb/s Seagate 10TB, which indicates that the SATA He10 likely offers superior power efficiency metrics.
