02
Sat, Nov
2 New Articles

Thinking About Using a 15K Drive for Your Database or Email Server?

Typography
  • Smaller Small Medium Big Bigger
  • Default Helvetica Segoe Georgia Times

Here are six tips for selecting HDD and SSD drives that may cause you to think twice.

 

One of the hottest topics today among IT managers is storage and how to configure it in a virtualized data center that may be complemented by cloud access and requirements for big data applications. Yet is anyone asking the questions—at least the right questions—about what types of hard drives should be used to support these new architectures?

 

The advent of solid-state drives (SSDs) into the enterprise has introduced a new type of internal technology to storage hardware. The variety of drive types available in the market previously defined only by interface, size, access time, reliability, and, of course, cost is no longer applicable. Is it still appropriate, for example, to say that serial-attached SCSI (SAS) is better for databases when there are very fast SSD drives with serial ATA (SATA) interfaces that can do far better? Sure, we all have heard that SSD drives can be leveraged to serve frequently used data to improve speed. But could the issues be more involved than that? Storage vendor Nexsan has taken on the somewhat perplexing list of questions emerging from today's changing landscape of storage drive hardware in a white paper, "6 Tips for Selecting HDD and SSD Drives."

 

The company takes into account the different types of environments in which the drives are being asked to perform and makes a number of observations and recommendations useful to those who must decide which drives to deploy in what circumstances. Following are their six tips:

 

1. Don't confuse interface type with disk performance.

2. For the best cost per gigabyte, 3.5-inch RPM SATA is still king.

3. HDD performance is mostly dictated by density and mechanical speed.

4. Consider SSD instead of 10K or 15K drives for transactional workloads.

5. SSD and 10K/15K drives are not better for video.

6. Sweat the small stuff (don't skip or let your vendor skip testing phases).

 

Let's take a closer look at each of these and find out exactly what Nexsan has discovered in its in-depth engineering testing.

 

1. Don't confuse interface type with disk performance. For quite some time, SAS drives were thought of as fast, while SATA drives were generally considered denser. Such shorthand is no longer appropriate, and the two drives are differentiated only by their input/output (I/O) chips. They are physically identical under the covers, according to Nexsan. As such, an "SAS array" filled with 7200 RPM NL-SAS drives will deliver the same performance as ordinary SATA drives of the same family. If someone is looking for a high input/output operations per second (IOPS) configuration for a transactional workload, they may be disappointed by 7200 RPM SAS drives, which deliver the same sequential and random performance as equivalent SATA drives.

 

Nor should users think of either SAS or SATA drives as being different in terms of reliability, says Nexsan. The typical 3.5-inch 15,000 RPM SAS drive has a typical reliability rating of 1.6M hour mean time between failures (MTBF). The 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) 7200 RPM NL-SAS drives have typical MTBF ratings of 1.4M hours. (Yes, 3.5-inch drives are generally more reliable than 2.5-inch drives.) Yet, there are several SATA drives with MTBF ratings of 2 million hours, including the 7200 RPM 3TB Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000. So how can you make a blanket statement that SAS drives are more reliable? It's simply not true, says Nexsan.

 

2.  For the best cost per gigabyte, 3.5-inch 7200 RPM SATA is still king. The tried and true 3.5-inch 7200 RPM SATA drive continues to offer the lowest cost per GB of any common drive. Regardless of the pricing model, users can count on 2.5-inch drive systems costing about twice as much per gigabyte as 3.5-inch systems, assuming both are using enterprise-grade drives. When opting for 10K and 15K SAS solutions in either 2.5-inch or 3.5 inch configurations, expect to pay three to six times more per gigabyte than the slower 7200 RPM drives. SSD solutions can be from 10 to 50 times more expensive per gigabyte than a 3.5-inch 7200 RPM SATA drive.

 

3. HDD performance is mostly dictated by density and mechanical speed. Rated interface performance almost always has little or no effect on random, or transactional, IOPS, nor on sequential performance. (The exception is complex or new interfaces with immature driver stacks.) The reason is that a single 3GB SATA port is faster than today's fastest drives, which can sustain less than 200BM/s. For random performance, such as against databases, in email servers, or in hypervisor environments, what is important, however, is access time, determined by rotation speed and seek time. Sequential performance, important for video applications and disk-to-disk (D2D) backups, is affected by the RPM of the drive and the bits per cylinder. Speeds will decline dramatically as the drive moves from the outermost to the inner cylinders.

 

4. Consider SSD instead of 10K or 15K drives for transactional workloads. SSD drives are advancing at a rapid rate, and in terms of cost per IOPS and IOPS per watt, they now are the leader. It's entirely probable that an all-SSD solution will have lower capital and operational costs than one built on 15,000 RPM drives due to the reduction in total slots required to achieve a given transaction performance as well as a reduction in power costs. While concerns about reliability of SSDs have been prevalent, Nexsan says that some enterprise SSDs meet or exceed the reliability of 15,000 RPM mechanical drives. Nexsan prefers single level cell (SLC) over multi level cell (MLC) drives as the company believes they display better random write performance and have the highest write cycle durability of flash-based devices. Other vendors, including IBM, find that MLC SSD drives better meet customer needs than SLC drives. Where high rotation drives might have been considered in the past for demanding database or mail server applications, today SSDs appear to be a better choice.

 

5.  SSD and 10K/15K drives are not better for video. For video and other streaming media applications, 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives are not better for video unless there are numerous independent streams being written or read from the same RAID set. A 3TB 7200 RPM drive has a higher sequential speed than does a 2TB drive and often will have a higher sustained sequential performance than the 15,000 RPM drive, according to Nexsan. In small RAID sets, the limiting factor is likely the drive transfer rate. In large RAID sets, or with a single controller supporting a large number of drives, the limiting factor is generally the RAID engine or the SAN interface rather than the disk speed. Therefore, it makes sense to select a drive based on cost or reliability, and you will save on energy with the lower speed drives.

 

6. Sweat the small stuff. The thrust of this tip is to work with a reliable vendor that cares about testing its drives and doesn't buy seconds or factory rejects. As Nexsan notes, every time a drive is handled or shipped, its reliability goes down. There is a "gray market" in drives, and the products traded by these vendors are generally not coming directly from the factory. A drive considered "enterprise class"— as opposed to "consumer grade"—is a drive that passes the manufacturer's highest quality and reliability tests. Or, as we have heard so often, you get what you pay for.

Knowledge Is Power

It's clear that Nexsan is concerned about storage, but it's also concerned about the customer. Knowing which type of drive to install in which setting can have dramatic implications for system performance, so it's worth learning as much as possible before configuring storage. To download a free copy of the Nexsan white paper from which the above tips were extracted, visit "6 Tips for Selecting HDD and SSD Drives."

 

Chris Smith

Chris Smith was the Senior News Editor at MC Press Online from 2007 to 2012 and was responsible for the news content on the company's Web site. Chris has been writing about the IBM midrange industry since 1992 when he signed on with Duke Communications as West Coast Editor of News 3X/400. With a bachelor's from the University of California at Berkeley, where he majored in English and minored in Journalism, and a master's in Journalism from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Chris later studied computer programming and AS/400 operations at Long Beach City College. An award-winning writer with two Maggie Awards, four business books, and a collection of poetry to his credit, Chris began his newspaper career as a reporter in northern California, later worked as night city editor for the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and went on to edit a national cable television trade magazine. He was Communications Manager for McDonnell Douglas Corp. in Long Beach, Calif., before it merged with Boeing, and oversaw implementation of the company's first IBM desktop publishing system there. An editor for MC Press Online since 2007, Chris has authored some 300 articles on a broad range of topics surrounding the IBM midrange platform that have appeared in the company's eight industry-leading newsletters. He can be reached at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

BLOG COMMENTS POWERED BY DISQUS

LATEST COMMENTS

Support MC Press Online

$

Book Reviews

Resource Center

  • SB Profound WC 5536 Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application. You can find Part 1 here. In Part 2 of our free Node.js Webinar Series, Brian May teaches you the different tooling options available for writing code, debugging, and using Git for version control. Brian will briefly discuss the different tools available, and demonstrate his preferred setup for Node development on IBM i or any platform. Attend this webinar to learn:

  • SB Profound WP 5539More than ever, there is a demand for IT to deliver innovation. Your IBM i has been an essential part of your business operations for years. However, your organization may struggle to maintain the current system and implement new projects. The thousands of customers we've worked with and surveyed state that expectations regarding the digital footprint and vision of the company are not aligned with the current IT environment.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT Generic IBM announced the E1080 servers using the latest Power10 processor in September 2021. The most powerful processor from IBM to date, Power10 is designed to handle the demands of doing business in today’s high-tech atmosphere, including running cloud applications, supporting big data, and managing AI workloads. But what does Power10 mean for your data center? In this recorded webinar, IBMers Dan Sundt and Dylan Boday join IBM Power Champion Tom Huntington for a discussion on why Power10 technology is the right strategic investment if you run IBM i, AIX, or Linux. In this action-packed hour, Tom will share trends from the IBM i and AIX user communities while Dan and Dylan dive into the tech specs for key hardware, including:

  • Magic MarkTRY the one package that solves all your document design and printing challenges on all your platforms. Produce bar code labels, electronic forms, ad hoc reports, and RFID tags – without programming! MarkMagic is the only document design and print solution that combines report writing, WYSIWYG label and forms design, and conditional printing in one integrated product. Make sure your data survives when catastrophe hits. Request your trial now!  Request Now.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericForms of ransomware has been around for over 30 years, and with more and more organizations suffering attacks each year, it continues to endure. What has made ransomware such a durable threat and what is the best way to combat it? In order to prevent ransomware, organizations must first understand how it works.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericIT security is a top priority for businesses around the world, but most IBM i pros don’t know where to begin—and most cybersecurity experts don’t know IBM i. In this session, Robin Tatam explores the business impact of lax IBM i security, the top vulnerabilities putting IBM i at risk, and the steps you can take to protect your organization. If you’re looking to avoid unexpected downtime or corrupted data, you don’t want to miss this session.

  • SB HelpSystems ROBOT GenericCan you trust all of your users all of the time? A typical end user receives 16 malicious emails each month, but only 17 percent of these phishing campaigns are reported to IT. Once an attack is underway, most organizations won’t discover the breach until six months later. A staggering amount of damage can occur in that time. Despite these risks, 93 percent of organizations are leaving their IBM i systems vulnerable to cybercrime. In this on-demand webinar, IBM i security experts Robin Tatam and Sandi Moore will reveal:

  • FORTRA Disaster protection is vital to every business. Yet, it often consists of patched together procedures that are prone to error. From automatic backups to data encryption to media management, Robot automates the routine (yet often complex) tasks of iSeries backup and recovery, saving you time and money and making the process safer and more reliable. Automate your backups with the Robot Backup and Recovery Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAManaging messages on your IBM i can be more than a full-time job if you have to do it manually. Messages need a response and resources must be monitored—often over multiple systems and across platforms. How can you be sure you won’t miss important system events? Automate your message center with the Robot Message Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAThe thought of printing, distributing, and storing iSeries reports manually may reduce you to tears. Paper and labor costs associated with report generation can spiral out of control. Mountains of paper threaten to swamp your files. Robot automates report bursting, distribution, bundling, and archiving, and offers secure, selective online report viewing. Manage your reports with the Robot Report Management Solution. Key features include:

  • FORTRAFor over 30 years, Robot has been a leader in systems management for IBM i. With batch job creation and scheduling at its core, the Robot Job Scheduling Solution reduces the opportunity for human error and helps you maintain service levels, automating even the biggest, most complex runbooks. Manage your job schedule with the Robot Job Scheduling Solution. Key features include:

  • LANSA Business users want new applications now. Market and regulatory pressures require faster application updates and delivery into production. Your IBM i developers may be approaching retirement, and you see no sure way to fill their positions with experienced developers. In addition, you may be caught between maintaining your existing applications and the uncertainty of moving to something new.

  • LANSAWhen it comes to creating your business applications, there are hundreds of coding platforms and programming languages to choose from. These options range from very complex traditional programming languages to Low-Code platforms where sometimes no traditional coding experience is needed. Download our whitepaper, The Power of Writing Code in a Low-Code Solution, and:

  • LANSASupply Chain is becoming increasingly complex and unpredictable. From raw materials for manufacturing to food supply chains, the journey from source to production to delivery to consumers is marred with inefficiencies, manual processes, shortages, recalls, counterfeits, and scandals. In this webinar, we discuss how:

  • The MC Resource Centers bring you the widest selection of white papers, trial software, and on-demand webcasts for you to choose from. >> Review the list of White Papers, Trial Software or On-Demand Webcast at the MC Press Resource Center. >> Add the items to yru Cart and complet he checkout process and submit

  • Profound Logic Have you been wondering about Node.js? Our free Node.js Webinar Series takes you from total beginner to creating a fully-functional IBM i Node.js business application.

  • SB Profound WC 5536Join us for this hour-long webcast that will explore:

  • Fortra IT managers hoping to find new IBM i talent are discovering that the pool of experienced RPG programmers and operators or administrators with intimate knowledge of the operating system and the applications that run on it is small. This begs the question: How will you manage the platform that supports such a big part of your business? This guide offers strategies and software suggestions to help you plan IT staffing and resources and smooth the transition after your AS/400 talent retires. Read on to learn: