How Do SSDs Redefine Storage Performance?

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It only takes one or two modern SSDs to outperform business-class RAID arrays with four or eight hard drives. We're running a full comparison and looking at the implications for high-performance systems when you make the transition to flash-based tech.

The HDDs: Fujitsu MBA3147RC (147 GB, 15 000 RPM)

The MBA3147RC by Toshiba (formerly Fujitsu) is one of the last 3.5” 15 000 RPM hard drives with a 3 Gb/s SAS interface. Newer drives are available from Hitachi and Seagate, but we happened to still have eight of these enterprise drives in our test lab. Since I/O performance hasn’t increased much recently, we decided these drives still represent what will be running in many business environments today.

A 122 MB/s maximum transfer rate isn’t that special anymore; hard drives reached 200 MB/s a while back. However, I/O performance is still close to what you’d get from more current 15 000 RPM drives, plus ganging four or eight drives into a RAID naturally boosts overall performance. Utilizing even faster hard drives wouldn’t make much difference given the already-significant performance gap between HDD and SSD.

Please look at our Enterprise HDD Charts for comparison data on these hard drives.

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