Home > Servers > Rack and Tower Servers > Intel > White Papers > Get better transactional database performance with a R740xd server with value SAS and NVMe SSDs from KIOXIA > Comparing apples to apples
RAID 10 (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) technology helps protect data by writing multiple copies of the same data on different drives. The extra work data redundancy requires ties up some of the available performance capabilities of the drives. To reflect real-world configurations, we used hardware RAID 10 for both the enterprise SATA SSDs and the RM5 Series value SAS SSDs. The CD5 Series data center NVMe SSDs ran without hardware RAID because it is not available for NVMe drives in the current test configuration.
To explore the performance of the enterprise SATA and value SAS drives without RAID, we conducted the tests a second time without using a RAID configuration for any of the drives. In the chart below, the lower two blue- shaded bars represent these additional data points. The SATA drive performance improved but fell well short of that achieved by the RM5 Series value SAS and CD5 Series data center NVMe SSDs.
Despite the fact that our server used top-of-line processors, our transactional database workload running on value SAS and data center NVMe SSDs without RAID fully utilized the CPUs before we hit the performance ceiling of these drives. This explains why the performance of the two drives without RAID is so similar. Unlike the enterprise SATA SSDs, RM5 Series value SAS and CD5 Series data center NVMe storage options can help fully utilize the compute potential of each server.