Analysis: Which Enterprise Capacity Point Performs Best?

Features
By Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos
published

SSDs are best for performance. SATA hard drives provide maximum capacity. Enterprise-class SAS disks are the workhorses positioned between them. But which enterprise hard drive capacity makes sense when there are several from which to choose?

Benchmark Results: Drive Temperature And Power Consumption

Drive Surface Temperature

Apparently, the two-platter drive runs a bit cooler than the three platter model, which comes as no surprise.

Power Consumption

As expected, idle power is lower on the drives that utilizes less platters. The 450GB and 600GB drives with three platters both require 0.5W more power in active idle (spinning).

Delivering data at peak throughput results in similar power consumption. The difference between two and three platters is smaller now.

Power consumption during delivery of a defined data stream (video) was highest on the 450GB drive for some reason.

Workstation I/O power consumption scales with the amount of heads utilized.

Patrick Schmid and Achim Roos