EMC Drive Sizing
When working with SAN/NAS configurations one of the core design decisions is almost always centered on the hard drives. No surprise right, after all, that’s the whole purpose of the SAN in the first place…..to store data on disk. Almost always in design discussions with clients and our own account executives the question would come up “Well, how much more expensive is this drive than that drive?” or “What drives are available now?”. It seems like every few months a new drive capacity, drive speed or both comes out and prices keep changing. To remedy this internally I created a quick cheat sheet specifically for EMC’s available drives.
All pricing is MSRP but it gives you a good comparison of the types of drives that are available and the cost per usable gigabyte for each.
Just a few things to remember:
- Size isn’t everything (all you perv’s out there hold the wise cracks!). I/O is just as important.
- All 1TB blocks of data storage space are not created equal. I/O is an important consideration in this game.
- 1 x 1T SATA disk = ~80 I/O
- 3 x 600GB 10k FC disks (RAID5) = ~360 I/O
- 10 x 146GB 15k FC disks (RAID5) = ~1800 I/O
- Once you have your space and I/O requirements dialed in you can start to play the numbers game with the available disk option to get the most bang for your buck.
- Drive pricing is constantly changing (monthly in some cases) so stay in touch with your vendor as you are nearing a new storage upgrade.
- Drive sizes are getting larger so check with your vendor to see if there is anything new coming down the pipe in the near future that may save you some money.
