SSD vs SAS

[LavrentiBeria]

How do the new Solid State drives stack up vs the SAS technology. Would solid state drives be apt to outperform a box using an SAS adoptor plus 15,000 rpm scsi drives?

 

[Arcanedeath]

Yes SSDs are faster than even 15k SAS drives, by an order of magnitude for random access.

 

[Hey Zeus]

I wish they made 15K Sata drives

 

[ulukay]

How do the new Solid State drives stack up vs the SAS technology. Would solid state drives be apt to outperform a box using an SAS adoptor plus 15,000 rpm scsi drives?

ssds are much faster than sas drives for almost everything
i had 3 15krpm sas drives on an intel raid controller and they were much slower than a single OCZ Vertex (speaking for general windows and game loading times)

now i got 8 ocz vertex on an intel sas controller. perfect setup to wipe anything off the face of the earth

 

[pjkenned]

Here's my experience with 8x 2.5" Savvio 15k SAS drives in Raid 5 v. an OCZ Vertex: http://www.servethehome.com/?p=147

At that point I was using a SSD, a 3x Cheetah 15k.5 (3.5" 15k SAS), and the 8x Savvio SAS array.

I will say that there are some instances where the SAS array is WAY faster, especially any decently large sequential transfers. Even with the 8x 2.5" 15k rpm drive array, the SSD had faster small reads/ writes. Once booted, it will depend on your workload which is faster since, despite some people's facination with small reads/ writes, there are many people for whom 700MB/s sequential (with WAY faster access times than 7200rpm SATA) reads are important. Raid controller cache can also help spindle drives quite a bit since anything that is in read cache is going to be faster than a SSD sans raid controller (DDR/DDR2 on a PCIe x8 bus is faster than NAND on SATA II/III).

That all being said, 1 SSD = quiet, cool, and involves no vibration so now all of my SAS drives have been deployed to servers. Price wise though, at 256GB and greater capacities, SAS + a decent raid controller can be cheaper.

 

[Yuriman]

With 2 SSDs in RAID0 I get over 500MB/s sequential read, and they almost certainly cost less than 8x SAS drives.

 

[Emulex]

yeah and most of us that have 8 to 12 15K SAS drives use them - the ssd options would keel over dead long before the hard drives. i've got drives rocking out from 1999 still, mail servers (freebsd!) churning 24x7. I'm not sure if an SLC at those loads would still be original? raid increases the write cycle keep in mind. raid-5/10 writes 2x-(# of number of drives minus 1) over jbod

 

[pjkenned]

The 36.7 GB savvios gave 256gb subtracting the parity disk in Raid 5 at a cost, months ago, of $33/ each. The main cost was the controller/ BBU. 700MB/s read 500MB/s write is pretty darn fast and, of course, this is raid 5 aka with fault tolerance, versus raid 0 which is the lose your data/ spend time restoring from backup raid.

And for the record I use X25-M's, Indilinx, Phison, and Samsung SSD's daily as spindle drives are now relegated to servers that I remote desktop into. It is a different kind of fast with SAS.