A Big Step Up from SATA: Testing KIOXIA RM6 Series Value SAS SSDs

Prowess Consulting testing showed that KIOXIA RM6 Series Value Serial-Attached SCSI (vSAS) solid-state drives (SSDs) can deliver improved database performance on transaction processing and query-based workloads compared to 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) Serial ATA (SATA) SSDs, at a similar cost.
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The Serial ATA (SATA) interface for storage drives was introduced in 2000, and its last major revision in 2008 brought support for 6 gigabits per second (Gb/s) speeds.1 SATA drives have limitations, such as the half-duplex inability to read and write at the same time, that make them no longer suitable for the increasing performance demands of the modern data center.

As data centers look to modernize away from SATA drives, there are two main alternatives to consider: Serial-Attached SCSI (SAS) and NVM Express™ (NVMe™). SAS is now a common storage interface in data centers, and NVMe is a newer, costlier, and higher-performing interface.2 Companies still reliant on SATA drives can benefit from benchmark testing to help them decide at what pace and for what workloads to upgrade to SAS drives. Prowess Consulting conducted testing to evaluate the performance differences between KIOXIA value SAS (vSAS) drives and Samsung® SATA drives on typical database workloads in a modern data center. The testing used Microsoft® SQL Server® running on Windows Server® 2022, and it ran HammerDB benchmarks to evaluate both online transaction processing (OLTP) workloads (with the TPROC-C benchmark) and analytic workloads (with the TPROC-H benchmark). According to HammerDB, these two benchmarks “complement each other in investigating the capabilities of a particular database.”3

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