Enterprise SAS drives are today’s best choice for most IT shops
The smart guys at Tom’s Hardware have done a yeoman’s job of sorting the facts from the fiction regarding SSDs for the enterprise. Their conclusions:
- SSDs are far faster than the speediest 15K SAS drive.
- SSDs are far more expensive than the speediest 15K SAS drive.
- Owners of high-end enterprise applications should look into adding SSD to increase overall performance – but think through all the possible ramifications.
- The rest of us should be patient and enjoy the superior performance vs. price of enterprise disk drives.
According to Tom’s:
If you look at the cost of enterprise flash SSDs, which is in the area of $1,000 to $1,500 for only 32 or 64 GB, the new Hitachi and Seagate enterprise hard drives clearly offer better value, as they are available starting at less than $400 for the 146 GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.6.
IT is rarely all or nothing. This holds true with storage as SSD enhances, not replaces, spinning media.
As a proud Seagate employee, I’m compelled to also share another excerpt:
Clearly, this review shows that some new hard drive stars have been born: the Ultrastar does well, but the real showpiece is the Cheetah. While the Hitachi Ultrastar 15K450 makes an excellent impression by outperforming all the other 15,000 RPM hard drives, the Seagate Cheetah 15K.6 is even faster, reaching almost 175 MB/s sequential throughput at very short access times, with great I/O performance.
Any enterprise SSD users out there? I’d like to hear some real-world results.
I think SSD drives are going to require two things to occur to really “take off” in enterprise storage. One option is to leverage SSD drives in products that can do block level storage tiering (i.e. Compellent, Equallogic, futures for Pillar Data) However, I don’t think they alone will help the progression, I think costs will have to continue to drop. At the end of the data SSDs will really fill a spot where hot spot contentions occur in data sets and caching needs to be long term (i.e. more than seconds/minutes)
HI THERE WELL I THINK THE HARD CORE GAMERS WILL USE MOST SOLID STATE DRIVES OR SSD I PLAY HIGH END VIDEO GAMES AND WILL PUT A SOLID STATE DRIVE TOO GOOD USEAGE.
[…] is a larger and more profitable niche for SSDs – but even there the opportunity is at the tip of the storage iceberg that will remain […]
[…] is a larger and more profitable niche for SSDs – but even there the opportunity is at the tip of the storage iceberg that will remain […]