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REPORT ANALYSIS AND CONCLUSION
The LSI SAS 9300-8e HBA and HGST Ultrastar SSD800MM SAS SSD proved that they are both excellent products. No matter what test we threw at them, they shined through. For the 9300-8e, the best compliment that we can give it is that at no point did we even notice that there was an HBA between the host and the SSD. Now, we weren’t able to make an apples-to-apples comparisons with other products, so we might not have a good frame of reference, but we have a feeling that it wouldn’t matter.
For the SSD800MM, we can’t say enough kind things. Read performance was out of this world for a 2.5″ SSD. At 150K IOPS, the SSD800MM is 50% faster than the SMART Optimus that we like so much. We were also blown away by the consistent write performance. When you top off that level of performance with high write endurance, you have a winner on your hands.
The only problem that we had either product is that we don’t know what their prices are. LSI will announce pricing when they get closer to release later this summer. For HGST, you will need to talk to a distributor to get current pricing. And really, that is the only reason why we can’t officially call this the best HBA/SSD combo. If pricing is even 50% more than their 6Gbps peers, the value proposition still makes sense.
Either way, both companies are paving the way for 12Gbps SAS in the enterprise space. With that level of performance, we can’t wait to see what’s next.
I’ve long been a proponent of running virtualization environments totally under SSDs. This 12G technology should be the convincer. Would have liked to see some RAID 0 benchmarks run with 4 and 8 SSD units. Curious as to how linear the performance gains would be.
This will come in time and obtaining multiple drives for this report was not possible. We always ask as was obvious with our recent Intel and Adaptec/SMART report where we used 24 Optimus SSDs.
Other sites already did 12 gb/s weeks ago! Did you guys miss that?
Oh really? Perhaps you can send us a link or two to a 12Gbps review (not announcement). Thanks ahead.
These are the first that we are aware of.
Tweaktown and storage review have both already done 12Gbs with the true first 12gbs ssd… the toshiba! This isn’t even the first 12gbs ssd.
You are absolutely correct and thanks. Paul snuck one in there while we were on our way to Computex. Thanks for the heads up!
Three weeks ago….