7200 rpm SAS is a secret weapon for content streaming applications
For the first time, the Storage Performance Council is testing components – drive performance in a multi-drive enterprise system. These tests are data center equivalents of PC benchmarks. Until now, SPC has been focused on system-level performance.
The Seagate Barracuda ES SAS drive outperformed the fastest equivalent SATA drive by 8% in the SPC-1C tests (simulating online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads) and by 34% in SPC-2C tests (simulating sequential read/write environments).
SPC-2C is especially interesting, given that it represents fast-growing content streaming applications. These systems are gated by performance and capacity. Unlike OLTP apps that are mostly about performance, and backup/archive apps that are mostly about capacity, content streaming wants to have its cake and eat it too.
Barracuda ES SAS is the first of its kind: a 7200 rpm drive (for capacity) with a SAS interface (for performance). It doesn’t compare to 15K rpm drives in speed of course. Given the price per terabyte difference, that’s OK.
Leave A Comment