Lenovo ThinkServer SA120 JBOD Review

Lenovo ThinkServer SA120 JBOD Review
Welcome to a Laptop AC Adapter specialist of the Toshiba Ac Adapter
The ThinkServer SA120 ships in a 2U rack form factor with up to 12 3.5" hot-swap SAS HDDs and up to four 2.5" hot-swap SATA SSDs in the rear. Drive access spans the entire face of the device. Two to eight storage arrays could be connected to a server through cascading mode. The device itself has a solid and rugged design with branding on both left and right ear caps. The integrity and cooling of the SA120 are protected with blank drive trays (if there are any vacant bays).
The front of the SA120 shows status indicators (Power-status, System identification (ID), Temperature-status, and System error LEDs), which are located on the left hand side of the device. In addition, each bay has a SAS-connector-status LED with adapter such as Toshiba Satellite X200 Ac Adapter, Toshiba G15 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Equium A60 Ac Adapter, Toshiba PA3165U-1ACA Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 1600 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 200 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite A100 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Tecra L2 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite M20 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite M65 Ac Adapter, Toshiba terca 8000 Ac Adapter, Toshiba Satellite 1900 Ac Adapter, rear I/O module status LED, Debug, SAS-out, and SAS-in connectors. There is no power switch on the storage array, as it turns on when you connect it to AC power.
The back panel shows two separate controllers, each equipped with a power supply, fan assembly, 2.5" drive cage (SATA-to-SAS), and two 2.5" drive bays.
Testing Background and Comparables
The ThinkServer SA120 JBOD supports both 3.5" and 2.5" SAS and SATA hard drives. For this review, we are using 6TB Seagate Enterprise Capacity SAS HDDs connected to a LSI 9300-8e HBA, leveraging Windows Storage Spaces. We configured the 6TB Seagate HDDs in a mirror (RAID10) configuration with Toshiba HK3R2 800GB (also in mirror) for cache.
•Seagate Enterprise Capacity (6TB, 6.0Gb/s SAS)
•Toshiba HK3R2 (800GB, 6.0Gb/s SAS)
We tested the ThinkServer SA120 JBOD on a Haswell-based SAS3 testing platform with the following configuration:
•2 x Intel Xeon E5-2697 v3 (2.6GHz, 35MB Cache)
•Windows Server 2012 R2 Standard
•Intel C612 Chipset
•Memory - 256GB (16 x 16GB) 2133Mhz DDR4 Registered RDIMMs
•LSI 9300-8e SAS/SATA 12.0Gb/s HBA
Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis
Our Enterprise Synthetic Workload Analysis includes four profiles based on real-world tasks. These profiles have been developed to make it easier to compare to our past benchmarks as well as widely-published values such as max 4k read and write speed and 8k 70/30, which is commonly used for enterprise systems.
•4k
◦100% Read or 100% Write
◦100% 4k
•8K (Sequential)
◦100% Read or 100% Write
•8k 70/30
◦70% Read, 30% Write
◦100% 8k
•128K (Sequential)
◦100% Read or 100% Write
With workloads composed of random 4k operations, the ThinkServer SA120’s HDD/SSD cache configuration reached 36,250 IOPS for write operations and 88,918 IOPS for read operations. In our HDD configuration, it posted 2,440 write and 6,478 IOPS read.