What can you do if you need high performance, only have 2.5 inch drive slots and can’t afford SSD?

Last year I built two servers using WD Red drives running in RAID 10. The performance is not that great and also not very consistent.

This year I built two more of the same servers, but wanted to equip them with Seagate Laptop SSHD disks which are a hybrid spinning disk/SSD with 8gb of SSD type memory. They cost a few dollars more, about $10 more at the time of this posting.

Reading benchmarks online before buying them, they should be faster than the WD RED drives… but the downside is they are not specifically designed for RAID based systems (does that matter?).

First up, WD Red:

Maximum Read: 143MB/sec
Maximum Write: 86MB/sec

Next, Seagate Laptop SSHD:

Maximum Read: 214MB/sec
Maximum Write: 193MB/sec

Overall, quite a big performance boost. I am really hoping that it helps with the write speed since the workload is just about all write.

I found doing file copies from an SSD over to the Seagate Hybrid drive in Windows was reporting write speeds of 400MB/Sec when coping a 90 gig file. That was very impressive.

To add some extra boost to these old servers I also equipped them with Kingston HyperX Predator 240 GB PCIe sold state drives. Using 100 GB of those drives as a boot device and the balance as a read cache for MySQL data which is stored on the Seagate RAID 10 drives.

How does the HyperX Predator perform in a benchmark test? Lets take a look.

Maximum Read: 1,388MB/sec
Maximum Write: 675MB/sec

Those are certainly some big numbers, looking forward to the price coming down so we can get a few TB of speeds like that.