NEW FUJITSU MBA Series Hard Drives !!

SpoilerFX · Feb 4, 2008

Hey all!

I'm pretty new here, so I thought I would start off by saying how much I enjoy reading and learning from everyone on these forums. From what I can gather, there is a great deal of knowledge and experience from the people here.

After reading throughout much of the storage threads, I got excited and decided to take my system beyond the lonely 74GB Raptor. So recently (about a week ago), I went out and purchased an adaptec raid controller and two new Fujitsu 15k SAS MBA Series 147GB drives. They are supposed to be pretty fast, so I can't wait to benchmark them. In my careless and impulsive shopping spree, I mistakingly bought the OEM raid controller that did not come with SAS cables. :bang head

The cable should be here tomorrow, so I will be sure to let you all know how they do. I didn't see anyone else post any of these drives here, so I thought you all might be interested.

In case you are wondering about the specs:
http://www.fujitsu.com/us/services/computing/storage/hdd/enterprise/mba3300-15k-rpm.html

Ocelaris · Feb 7, 2008

nice! I'm still a fan of the SAS... We have some 2.5" SAS 15k 75 gig drives, and they tear huge rar files to bits... I expect you will see similar things with the 3.5" SAS... What card did you get?

Evilsizer · Feb 7, 2008

nice! cant wait to see what they do!

SpoilerFX · Feb 7, 2008

And of course the unthinkable happens. The SAS cables I ordered 2nd day shipping were the wrong ones! I voiced my complaint with the company, so I should hopefully see the correct ones come in tomorrow.

The raid card is an Adaptec 3405. Won't be the fastest card out there, but I don't need anything past Raid 1 or 0.

RangerXLT8 · Feb 7, 2008

Those hard drives had to cost a fortune. SAS is str8 Enterprise level storage. I bet at least 600.00 each, if not more.

nd4spdbh2 · Feb 7, 2008

RangerXLT8 said:
Those hard drives had to cost a fortune. SAS is str8 Enterprise level storage. I bet at least 600.00 each, if not more.

ya serious.... id much rather of grabed 4 seagate 250gb 410as's and made a 100gb raid 0 partition on matrix raid with the rest in raid 5...

thoes drives are going to be so ungodly loud and hot ... gah i shudder at the thought.

tom10167 · Feb 7, 2008

nd4spdbh2 said:
ya serious.... id much rather of grabed 4 seagate 250gb 410as's and made a 100gb raid 0 partition on matrix raid with the rest in raid 5...

thoes drives are going to be so ungodly loud and hot ... gah i shudder at the thought.

Yeah RAID 0 and SCSI are comparable.

Oh wait, they aren't at all and these are going to whoop anything else out there.

Can't wait to see the results man!

If you get bored with the drive you can send me one, hell I'll even come pick it up!

Ocelaris · Feb 7, 2008

SAS drives aren't loud... we have them in all of our workstations at my office, and they're no louder than any other drive of comparable speed. The raptors are honestly louder. I'm torn between the raptors and the new SAS drives. The raptors have more of a zip than any of the 15k SAS drives we use... I noticed a considerable improvement when I moved from my 15k u320 Fujitsu MAS drives (~5 years old now) to the 150gig raptor.

The 2.5" 15k 73gig SAS drives are hard core. I can tear through 4 Rar extractions at the same time without a flinch... like normal drives, even the raptors will feel the hit of multiple reads/writes, but I watched as my friend unknowingly unrarred 5 simultaneous 4-8 gig DVDs and the thing just kept pumping out rars... now this is also on a quad core blade server... but still, I'm a fan of their multitasking ability.

The SAS disks when isolated aren't any louder or hotter than the Raptors...

I couldn't find the MBA fujitsu drives anywhere, but I expect the 147gig to go for around 280$ a piece? Not horrible considering a 16gig SSD is 400$

SpoilerFX · Feb 8, 2008

Yep, these MBA were hard to find. As for the noise.. I have two hard drive coolers that should help.

Speaking strictly hard drive performance, I wonder if I would see that great a difference using my NF4 board compared to one of my newer ones (keeping PCIe at at 4x)?

nd4spdbh2 · Feb 8, 2008

Ocelaris said:
SAS drives aren't loud... we have them in all of our workstations at my office, and they're no louder than any other drive of comparable speed. The raptors are honestly louder. I'm torn between the raptors and the new SAS drives. The raptors have more of a zip than any of the 15k SAS drives we use... I noticed a considerable improvement when I moved from my 15k u320 Fujitsu MAS drives (~5 years old now) to the 150gig raptor.

The 2.5" 15k 73gig SAS drives are hard core. I can tear through 4 Rar extractions at the same time without a flinch... like normal drives, even the raptors will feel the hit of multiple reads/writes, but I watched as my friend unknowingly unrarred 5 simultaneous 4-8 gig DVDs and the thing just kept pumping out rars... now this is also on a quad core blade server... but still, I'm a fan of their multitasking ability.

The SAS disks when isolated aren't any louder or hotter than the Raptors...

I couldn't find the MBA fujitsu drives anywhere, but I expect the 147gig to go for around 280$ a piece? Not horrible considering a 16gig SSD is 400$

Hmm lest see

as per fujitsu's spec sheet... the MBA 147gb SAS 15k drive is 36db @ idle (they dont dare give the seek number).... raptor 150 is 29db idle (36db seek) and seagate 410AS is 26db idle (28db seek).... and the measure of DB's are exponential... and it works out that such about every 3db the sound percieved is about twice as much... u figure it out..

And heat Fujitsu uses 12.8W idiling... raptor 150 is 10.02w MAX, idiling is 9.19, and 410as uses a MAX of 9.84w ....

So go ahead and tell me that a 15k SAS isnt louder or hotter...

SpoilerFX · Feb 9, 2008

I finally got some benchmarks!

Took me a while because I couldn't boot to windows when using the adaptec raid card with my MSI K9AG AM2+ board. :shrug:

I didn't want to take my main pc down, so I threw the raid setup into an 845G board with a crappy celeron. I have done three tests so far:

1. Tested a single drive at full volume.
2. Tested two drives in Raid 0 with 32GB array.
3. Same test but with hd tach.

Here is what I've got so far!

To answer your question of noise and heat..I don't think they are that much louder than my raptor. They do get louder with the random seek test, but I certainly don't think they are half as bad as some video cards out there. As for heat, they get pretty warm! I will definitely make sure these have some air on them.

I will do so more testing later, but so far they seem really fast. I have also been pretty pleased with the adaptec 3405 raid controller. Aside from the problem with my AM2 board, I'm really enjoying working with this one.

Now it's time to get a darn mobo with three PCIe slots. Well, at least 2

RangerXLT8 · Feb 9, 2008

There's no question these drives are faster than raptors. They are Enterprise drives, some of the best made and there purpose is speed and reliability, companies with a room full of servers with a bunch of these drives are not worried about noise.

nd4spdbh2 · Feb 9, 2008

RangerXLT8 said:
There's no question these drives are faster than raptors. They are Enterprise drives, some of the best made and there purpose is speed and reliability, companies with a room full of servers with a bunch of these drives are not worried about noise.

exactly... like you said no doubt these are THEE fastest drives... but for what i do, id much rather have 4 250gb seagate 410as's id have more space, and if i did ~ a 60gb raid 0 matrix drive on the first part of each drive, i could pull numbers of about 350-400MB/s average str and round 6-7or so ms random access time... all the while being cooler quieter and alot more cost effective. But hey if i had money to go burn id look into SAS 15k drives too.

SpoilerFX · Feb 9, 2008

I was able to snag each drive for about $300, so they weren't too bad. I went for the these particular ones because I knew they would give me fast access times with a decent amount of storage space. I really liked the idea of having some mtron drives, but that would be way over my budget.

As soon as I get my new mobo, I want to test these out with some more thorough benchmarking. I am also excited to see my game load times decrease! I will be comparing these to a 2 raptor matrix raid array.

As a side note about heat...in my experience of pc building, I have yet to build a machine where heat became an issue. Noise is another story.

nd4spdbh2 · Feb 9, 2008

SpoilerFX said:
I was able to snag each drive for about $300, so they weren't too bad. I went for the these particular ones because I knew they would give me fast access times with a decent amount of storage space. I really liked the idea of having some mtron drives, but that would be way over my budget.

As soon as I get my new mobo, I want to test these out with some more thorough benchmarking. I am also excited to see my game load times decrease! I will be comparing these to a 2 raptor matrix raid array.

As a side note about heat...in my experience of pc building, I have yet to build a machine where heat became an issue. Noise is another story.

ya i just cant stand hard drive noise... its the worst noise of em all... cus its high pitched and really irritates me... hell hd noise ****es me off so much i rubber mounted the hard drive in my laptop :beer:

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