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) Western Digital Raptor WD360 (36.7GB SATA) IBM Deskstar 180GXP (185.2GB PATA) Western Digital Caviar WD1200JB (120GB PATA) Western Digital Raptor BETA (36.7GB SATA) Seagate Barracuda ATA V (120GB PATA) Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 (80GB PATA) Seagate Barracuda Serial ATA V (80GB SATA) 331 327 253 242 224 217 216 215 212 | 0 | 66 | 132 | 199 | 265 | 331 | 397

This is a teaser of what is to come in Part II of our coverage of the Raptor, here we see that it is faster than all ATA/SATA drives, but it is still a bit slower than the two SCSI offerings. Since WD is targeting the enterprise market, performance in these tests is critical to finding out how well they deliver on the "similar performance to SCSI, but at a lower cost" promise. We will reserve judgment in that area until part II, where we focus exclusively on enterprise performance, we just wanted to give you all an update right away on the drive's performance in our original suite.