Hard Disk Drives
In many servers the bottleneck for performance is the physical read and write speed of the hard disk drives. A slow hard disk can result in extensive memory usage and high CPU load. This is why WebDeal only works with top-end hard disk drives when hosting and designing systems.
Understanding the different technologies
Comparing offers from different suppliers can be an exhausting task, but it pays off – certain hard disk specifications are what separates a first-class server from an average one.
|
Type |
Description |
Standard speed |
|---|---|---|
|
IDE/ATA |
This is the oldest and slowest hard disk technology currently on the market and should therefore not be used in servers. |
5 400 rpm |
|
S-ATA |
This is the technology often used in low-end servers because of its low price. Even though it's faster than IDE/ATA, it is still considered to be a risky choice due to the amount of failures in these cheap drives. |
7 200 rpm |
|
SCSI |
SCSI used to be the faster brother of IDE / ATA, but with the introduction of S-ATA, it lost its performance edge. |
10 000 rpm |
|
SAS |
Serial Attached SCSI is currently considered to be the best mainstream high performance hard disk system among enterprise server vendors. Even though the equipment looks a lot like S-ATA, it offers a far better performance and much more stable drives. |
10 000 rpm |
|
FC |
Fiber Channel is simply the addition of a fiber interface to the SCSI disk drive. It has an edge in storage area networks and is rarely used in single servers. |
10 000 rpm |
Our recommendation
The only good reason for choosing S-ATA technology instead of SAS is the cost. It's possible to get 10 000 rpm S-ATA disks with the same performance as 10,000 rpm SAS disks when reading large files. However, in order to maintain an appropriate performance level on random access of smaller files, SAS performs much better than S-ATA with the same rpm.
WebDeal recommends choosing SAS disk drives because of their reliability and performance advantages. SAS drives are available at both 10 000 rpm and 15 000 rpm. A 10 000 rpm will typically perform with around 80 MB/s on sequential data, while 15 000 rpm will perform beyond 110 MB/s. WebDeal can help you choose the speed that best suits your system setup.
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