Ssd Performance; Conclusion - Compaq BL10e - HP ProLiant - 512 MB RAM Technology Overview

 Limited airflow environments
 Environments subject to higher shock and vibration (up to 1000G)
 Environments requiring drives with lower power consumption (2 watts)
HP SSDs are designed for an operational life of over three years, the typical service life for a new
server. The NAND memory used in SSDs has a relatively well understood lifespan that is primarily
determined by the number of write/erase cycles to which it is subjected. As a result, SSD endurance
should be viewed differently from that of disk drives. A server SSD that has reached the end of its
service life is almost sure to start failing once the NAND endurance limit has been exceeded, whereas
a typical SAS disk drive may continue to operate for several years beyond its stated service life.
SSDs do not have great data retention characteristics. An SSD removed from a system may not be
readable one year later, whereas most disk drives will retain their data for a decade or more. This
makes them unsuitable for use as archival storage.

SSD performance

Second generations HP SSDs show significant performance improvements over the first generation
products from 2008. As Table 5 shows, the new midline SSDs offer performance that is equal to or
better than enterprise SAS drives. SSDs truly excel at random read operations, where their
performance is starting to approach over one hundred times that of disk drives.
Table 5. Performance comparison of SATA/SAS drives with SSDs for servers
6 Gb/s SAS drive
Class Enterprise
Interconnects 6 Gb/s SAS-2
Write performance 150 MB/s
sustained throughput @ 64 KB
Write performance 285
random IO/s (4 KB, Queue=16)
Read performance 90 MB/s
sustained throughput
Read performance 340
random IO/s (4 KB, Queue=16)

Conclusion

Disk technology is evolving rapidly. Hardware should be reviewed periodically to ensure that the most
cost-effective solutions are deployed. Enterprise class drives with SAS interconnects and HP SAS
Smart Array Controllers provide high performance storage that is the most reliable for industry-
standard servers. Other technologies may be appropriate for non-mission-critical applications.
Solid state drives are a rapidly evolving class of storage technology that can operate reliably in more
extreme environments than traditional disk drives, and can provide random I/O performance that is
far superior to traditional disk drives.
Value SSDs 2 nd generation
(preliminary) HP SATA SSDs
Enterprise Enterprise
value mainstream
3 Gb/s SATA 3 Gb/s SATA
TBD 180 MB/s
TBD 5000+
TBD 230 MB/s
TBD 20,000 +
HP SAS SSD's
(preliminary)
Enterprise
performance
6 Gb/s SAS-2
Dual Port
TBD
TBD
560 MB/s
Up to 100,000
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