Today we have quick benchmarks of the Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 200GB SLC SSD. For years, SLC NAND was the answer to high endurance and performance consistency. With newer controllers and flash algorithms we have seen MLC NAND take on a more prominent role in the enterprise market. The Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 is an interesting drive because it was fairly popular SAS 2 enterprise storage solution, and can be found both in OEM servers and now on the secondary market at reasonable prices. In terms of endurance, the Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 is rated at 18PB which means that the 200GB drive can have full random 4K writes 90,000 times or roughly 49 DWPD. We are comparing this SLC drive to some of the other popular offerings in the capacity range.
Test Configuration
Since we are going to assume the use of already released hardware, we are using a legacy system for testing across the test suite:
- Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-7PESH3
- Processors: Dual Intel Xeon E5-2690 (V2)
- SAS Controller: LSI SAS 3008
- RAM: 64GB DDR3L-1600MHz ECC RDIMMs
- OS SSD: Kingston V300 240GB
We are using a SAS controller so one cannot compare our SATA results directly to consumer-driven setups where a SATA SSD is connected to an Intel PCH port. There is a latency penalty for going over the PCIe bus to a controller to SAS. It also is a reason NVMe is going to be a game changer in the enterprise storage space. This impact is very tangible and we will have a piece comparing the SAS 3008 with a few other SATA controllers soon.
Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 200GB SLC SSD Quick Benchmarks
For our quick tests during this part of the series we will just provide the quick benchmarks with only a bit of commentary. The results should be fairly straightforward and we have added a few results for comparison purposes.
AS SSD Benchmark
AS SSD is a solid benchmark that does not write compressible data to drives. The result is perhaps one of the best workstation SSD benchmarks available today.
Perhaps the most direct comparison in our sample group is the SanDisk lb206s which is from the company’s Pliant acquisition. The SanDisk lb206s is a 200GB SLC SSD from around the same era. One can see that in all but the sequential write tests, the SATA Intel DC S3700 200GB drive outperforms the Hitachi SSD400S SLC drive. Of course, the Hitachi drive has significantly more write endurance but it does show the rapid advances in flash storage.
CrystalDiskMark
CrystalDiskMark is another benchmark which gives non-compressible read/write numbers. This is in contrast to the ATTO Benchmark used by LSI/ Sandforce and its partners when they market a given solid state drive.
In CDM, one can see a similar trend. The QD32 test is the Seagate 1200 SAS3 drive’s sweet spot. We do see that in our CDM testing, the Hitachi SLC drive performs significantly better than the Pliant/ SanDisk lb206s drive.
ATTO Benchmark
The value of the ATTO benchmark is really to show the best-case scenario. ATTO is known to write highly compressible data to drives, which inflates speeds of controllers that compress data like LSI/ SandForce does prior to writing on a given solid state drive.
In the 8k and smaller ATTO reads we see the SanDisk SLC offering pull off a nice second place finish. By the time we hit 32k transfer sizes, the Samsung read optimized SAS SSD takes the top spot followed by the Hitachi SLC SSD.
SLC drives are meant for heavy write workloads. Here we can see that the Hitachi SSD400S drive absolutely outperforms the SanDisk lb206s drive across the range, putting out numbers that were comparable to significantly newer drives.
Closing Thoughts
If you have an existing server with a Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 then it is unlikely you will find the need to replace the drive due to performance concerns on 6.0gbps SAS 2 controllers. Likewise, the 49 DWPD endurance means that the majority of these drives should still have writes left in them. For those looking at drives on the secondary market, there is a good chance that the Hitachi HUSSL4020ASS600 can be purchased on ebay or other sources with plenty of room to spare. Our test samples came to us each with under 800GB written over four years. Certainly for those looking at a solid ZIL or other write-heavy application, these SSDs have plenty of write endurance for the vast majority of those scenarios.
