Benchmarks: Just how much faster are SSDs vs. traditional hard disks?

Posted by admin on 11th November, 2011

3 Comments

As some of you may already know, we’re in the process of deploying our next generation application hosting servers which will all be powered by SSDs (solid state drives). Our conventional servers have always used 15K RP M SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives which were already quite fast, so you may be wondering just how much of an upgrade do SSDs present?

There are a few ways of measuring hard drive performance. One way is just to look at ‘sequential’ throughput but this is not very relevant to shared hosting, where random access/writes are a whole lot more important. So our benchmark is going to focus on “random seeks” only.

We performed benchmarks on the following different disk configurations, each in hardware RAID-10:

  • SATA: 4x 1TB Western Digital RE3 7200RPM SATA Drives (not the typical configuration used in ML servers, this is actually one of our backup servers)
  • SAS: 4x 147GB Seagate Chetah 15000RPM SAS Drives (a typical configuration in ML servers)
  • SSD: 4x 160GB Intel 320 SSD (our ‘next-gen’ config)

As you can see, the SSDs are significantly faster than anything else available on the market. Just to introduce another point of comparison, a server with a single 320GB WD 7200 RPM hard disk was able to achieve 74 seeks per second. The SSD configuration is over 100 times faster than this. 

We’ll be keeping our blog updated with our status on getting the new systems online. As some of our existing customers are already aware, existing servers are in the process of receiving the RAM upgrades we mentioned. For example, one server in particular (tesla) is going from 24GB to 48GB RAM this Sunday.

3 Responses to Benchmarks: Just how much faster are SSDs vs. traditional hard disks?

  1. Midave says:
    November 12, 2011 at 5:12 am

    That’s amazing.
    Thank you for not satisfied with current condition, instead you always improve your service.
    Bravo MediaLayer.

    Reply
  2. Ryan says:
    January 21, 2012 at 1:03 pm

    Got any of these in your EU facility yet?

    Reply
  3. admin says:
    February 9, 2012 at 12:45 pm

    Hi Ryan,

    My apologies for the delay in approving/responding to your comment.

    We don’t yet have these in EU, but expect to have it available in EU and the rest of our locations by later this year.

    We’ll be posting an update soon regarding the deployment of the SSD based boxes on the east coast (USA) – we’re very close!

    Reply

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