Preface & Overview
Most of the drives listed below were provided to me by bitdeals.tech, special thanks to the guys there for providing a pair of each for RAID 0 and RAID 1 testing. The drives were well packaged and out of 20+ drives, I had zero DOA.
This is not a definitive list of 2.5" SAS HDDs, of course. If I am able to test more models, I will add them to the list. If there’s a specific model that you would like me to test with the same methodology, feel free to leave a comment below and I’ll do my best.
Testing hardware
- Chenbro 2U chassis with iStarUSA 2.5" SAS/SATA 2 drive backplane
- 120GB SATA 3 SSD for OS boot
- BCM BC370Q motherboard
- Intel Celeron G4900T
- 12GB DDR4 2400
- LSI 9211-8i 6Gbps SAS2 HBA in IT mode (P20 firmware)
Generally speaking, I/O uses very little CPU even with basic software RAID0/1. Provided you have a similar setup as I do, results should be comparable.
Notes
- Some of these drives are SAS3 12Gbps. They are backwards compatible with SAS2. I highly doubt there will be any serious performance increase from a SAS3 HBA over the SAS2 model tested. Even if there is a performance increase, the increase in cost probably won’t be worth it.
- All of these drives are 15mm thick. This is about double the width of consumer 2.5" SSD, so make sure they will fit where you want to use them.
- Most of these models feature SAS dual port technology. To use SAS dual port, two cables must be connected to the HDD via the backplane, or in case of an expander type backplane, the technology must be supported.
- SAS dual port allows for fail-over should a cable or port die, as well as increased throughput should the software support it.
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These tests were not conducted with dual port, only single port. This means that numbers that you see here may differ from manufacturer specifications by quite a bit.
At this time, Windows does not support dual port for multi-read/write, only for fail-over. I may test this is the future with a different file system.
Testing Software
- Windows 10 Pro (2004 update)
- Software RAID0 and RAID1 were created using the native disk management tool with all default options.
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Crystal Disk Mark 7.0.0h
- Real World Performance [+Mix] profile
- 50% Read/Write setting
- 3 passes, 1GiB each (unless otherwise specified)
[HP DG0300FAMWN] - 300GB 10K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Toshiba MK3001GRRB] - 300GB 15K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Toshiba MBF2600RC] - 600GB 10K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Toshiba AL13SEB900] - 900GB 10.5K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Toshiba AL14SEB090N] - 900GB 10K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Seagate ST1000NX0453] - 1TB 7.2K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[HGST HUC10181CSS20] - 1.2TB 10K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Seagate ST2000NX0433] - 2TB 7.2K
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Single drive
2 drive RAID 1
2 drive RAID 0
[Seagate ST600MM0158] - 600GB 10K with 32GB Turbo Boost
Now this drive is a little different. It uses similar technology as Seagate’s consumer SSHDs, but with a much faster (but smaller) platter. Basically, if a file is read over and over again, it is moved to the SSD cache (providing it fits of course). I was only able to obtain one of these for a reasonable price. Below are tests using 3, 6, and 9 passes. As you can see, performance in throughput, IOPS, and latency drastically improves as the file is continuously read. Write performance basically does not change.
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Single drive
