Performance & Energy Shootout – SSDs vs. Traditional Disks

We all know the performance superiority of solid state drives compared to traditional spinning disk technologies, but how does their energy usage compare? With the recent release of a new storage benchmark from the Storage Performance Council (SPC) that looks at not only performance, but real world energy use, and the release of the first two tests, we have a chance to find out.

The first two results under the SPC’s SPC1-C/E benchmark were released along with the announcement of the new benchmark. One was a Seagate 300GB 10k rpm SAS drive subsystem and the other was an IBM 69GB Solid State Disk SAS configuration. As luck would have it, one result uses traditional rotating disk drives and the other uses solid state drive technology. This gives us an initial insight into the power consumption characteristics of these very different technology types, along with the more traditional price and performance aspects.

The above chart is analysis by IDEAS based on data supplied by the Storage Performance Council (SPC) in the two Executive Summaries of the two test results so far. Note that the segment for each bar with a green label is better than the red label. e.g. The lower cost per GB is better, even though it is the smaller segment of that bar on the chart.

Bearing in mind that the two subsystems have significant differences, such as the total addressable capacity for the IBM offering is just 548GB in contrast to the 3,600GB of the Seagate solution, an analysis of these first two results is interesting all the same.

• The outcomes certainly back up the perception of the speed of solid state technology over traditional spinning disk.
• But as the Cost per IOPS shows, the relatively higher cost of SSD technology means that the price performance of the two is on par.
• And if capacity rather than performance is your key requirement, then from an energy use perspective at least, spinning disk technologies would appear to still be in play.

The SPC1-C/E benchmark and the current results have now been added to the Competitive Profiles CPStorage module and as new results are released they will be added to the coverage. The full set of results can also be found on the SPC-1C and SPC-1C/E Benchmark Results page of the SPC web site.

The SPC is a non-profit corporation founded to define, standardize and promote storage benchmarks and to disseminate objective, verifiable storage performance data to the computer industry and its customers. The organization's strategic objectives are to empower storage vendors to build better products as well as to stimulate the IT community to more rapidly trust and deploy multi-vendor storage technology.

A more detailed analysis of these first two results will be featured in the July edition of Tech Trends Monthly, a free on-line newsletter produced by Ideas International.

Comments

[Gary Burgess]

Perry,

Thanks for your feedback. The choice of comparison was based on these being the only two results so far in the new SPC benchmark. http://www.storageperformance.org

Hopefully, as more results are published, we will get the opportunity to make more equalized comparisons.

[Perry Willson]

This comparison seemed a bit odd to me it compared a SSD at 548GB to a HDD at 3600GB. While you noted the size difference you didn’t account for it at all. You would need 6.5 of the SSD systems tested to store the same data! That doesn’t seem as close as apples and oranges. If the size were similar there would have been no comparison. At 3600GB the price difference would be: $15,209 HDD and $568,542 SSD The idle power would be 171.9w HDD and 1045.2w for the SSD.
I think many aspects of the comparison were great but if a drive system with 8 HDD’s or better yet 4 HDD’s had been compared the power, capacity and price comparisons would still go to the HDD system in a landslide.
You did a really good job on the stat’s that you gathered but to me they didn’t have a lot of meaning. How about a comparison that has similar capacity?
Thanks!