Hi does anyone have any input on how a SAS 15k RPM drive would perform compared to a sata based SSD drive, assuming its using the latest verison of sata.
These drives would be in a 4 drive raid 10 configurtion and the sizes are around 70GB per drive.
Best Answer
Given equivalent sizes, the SSD's will give you vastly more I/O operation performance than the SATAs will.
Both are fast enough to saturate the SATA connection given the right I/O access patterns, though the SSD's will deliver it more often.
As with most performance comparisons, it depends on what you're doing with them. At sizes like these I suspect you're more concerned with throughput than bulk storage. The SSD config will blow the SAS drives out of the water for the lots-of-random-tiny-accesses usage pattern, and you're going to be more constrained on your RAID1 controller (if hardware) or your SATA links.
The big caveat is one ErikA pointed to. The cheapest SSD drives you can get won't do much better than the SAS drives and will most certainly die a lot faster. The more advanced drives will both last longer and withstand more pounding.