From time to time some great deals pop up in the forums like yesterday forum member Miniknight found a deal on what are listed as new Toshiba PX03SNF080 800GB 12gbps SAS SSDs. Here is a link to the deal and also the thread on the STH Forums “Great Deals” forum with more information on the drives. Normally we do not bring SSD deals to the main site because they are in quantities of 1-6 and usually are sold out quickly. As of this post there seem to be 48 of these SSDs for sale so there is a sufficient quantity and these are higher-end drives.
Toshiba PX03SNF080 800GB Specifications
One can view the full specs page here. For quick reference here is a snapshot:
One can see that these drives can handle 1GB/s read but are slower on the write speed side. The PX03SNxxxx drives are read optimized drives with 1DWPD endurance (random writes) over five years which works out to about 1.46PB. For many workloads, this is more than enough.
Sample Performance
Recently we were able to benchmark the Toshiba PX03SNB160 which is the 1.6TB version of the drive on sale here and found it to perform fairly well. The 1.6TB drive as one can see from the spec table is rated as a slower drive but the basic performance characteristics remain similar. Here is an example of the AS SSD results we saw from the drive:
Overall, solid performance and one can see that on the high queue-depth 4K and sequential read workloads the drive performs very well indeed. This is largely due to the drives 12gbps SAS3 architecture. The major bonus with these drives is that if you need to saturate a 10GbE link, these drives have the read bandwidth to serve clients quickly. Head over to the forums to see more about this deal being vetted and more information on the drives.
