Western Digital Raptor Preview: 10,000RPM & Serial ATA

AnandTech Forums Database Server Performance

For our final performance test we have a trace of all I/O operations that occur during our AnandTech Forums DB Server trace. For those of you that aren't familiar with this test, we've historically used it in only our enterprise server CPU and platform reviews, but we decided to introduce it here because of its relevance to the topic at hand.

Here's a description of the test:

The database we tested is the Forums DB, which is by far the most transaction intensive database in the AnandTech Network. While the vast majority of the requests to the DB are in the form of selects (users reading categories and threads), there are significantly more inserts and updates (posting, thread/post counts, etc…) than in either of the other DBs. This database is also our largest, weighing in at just under 3GB during the testing and well over 10GB today (we used an older version of the DB from over a year ago).

We recorded a 30 minute trace of all activity to the AnandTech Forums DB Server, and used that as an input to our I/O trace recording. The end result, is what we have here today:

AnandTech Forums SQL Server Disk Performance Performance in I/O Operations per Second (Higher is better) Maxtor Atlas 10K IV (36GB U320 SCSI) Seagate Cheetah 10K.6 (36.7GB U320 SCSI) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) 331 327 242 224 217 216 215 212 | 0 | 66 | 132 | 199 | 265 | 331 | 397

Here we see a perfect, real-world example, of what sets SCSI drives apart from the competition. The caching algorithms, firmware, and performance logic present in these 10,000 RPM SCSI drives is highly tuned for the multi-user environments that you'll find in enterprise applications such as a database server (or file server or web server); thus we see a significant performance difference between the two SCSI contenders and the rest of the guys.

The important thing to take away from this chart is that the Raptor performs more like a conventional ATA drive rather than one of the SCSI solutions, reducing its potential as a contender in the enterprise world. So much for being a cheap SCSI alternative, let's just hope the shipping drive improves performance in at least enterprise applications if Western Digital expects to garner any significant sales.