Solid State Hard Drive or Faster CPU for SAS?

[Z_X_]

Hi,

I need to find out if I should upgrade with Solid State Hard Drive, or get a new higher level PC. 

Right now I have a Dell Precision Station T5500 for 5 years and it has slowed down recently since I have more and larger data set to work with. I wonder if I replace the existing rotational hard drive with Solid State Hard drive, how much the performance can improve? I usually work with SAS data sets with 1.5 million records, they are compressed and indexed, 1GB for one month of data.

My Dell T5500 has a CPU of "E5606 4Core 2.13GH" CPU, memory is "32G 1333MHz" and hard drive is "1TRB, S2, 7.2K, 32M SGT-MOOSE". If I replace the hard drive with a Solid State Drive, how faster it can be? 

If I get a Dell Precision Tower 7000, with rotational hard drive, is it faster than a lower model but with Solid State Hard Drive? The standard configuration of Dell Precision Tower 7000 is till rotational hard drive "2TB 3.5" Serial-ATA (7,200 RPM)", the CPU is "E5-2630 v4, 10C, 2.2GHz, 3.1GHz Turbo, 2133MHz, 25MB, 85W" and memory is "32GB (4x8GB) 2400MHz DDR4 RDIMM ECC".

Thanks in advance

[TomKari · Accepted solution]

While it's difficult to make "general" recommendations without knowing the details of your requirements, a general statement can be made that most of SAS processing is I/O intensive, due to the nature of the product.

Therefore, if I had to make a shot in the dark, I would recommend improving your I/O environment over anything else. Therefore, the SSD looks like a winner to me. (if possible, get two, one for your permanent data and one for your work storage).

Here's a link to the SAS collection of Scalability and Performance documents; I'm sure there will be some very good recommendations there.

http://support.sas.com/rnd/scalability/papers/

Tom

[Z_X_]

Thanks, I will go with SSD.