Lab Report for High‑Density HDD ZFS Performance Evaluation on AIC SB407-VA server

Introduction

High density HDD platforms continue to play a critical role in environments where vast sequential datasets must be moved, analysed, or archived efficiently. As organisations build petabyte scale data lakes, long retention backup repositories, and virtualisation infrastructures with large numbers of concurrently active workloads, the Toshiba Electronics Europe (TEE) HDD Laboratory team wanted to put the following under test: how much performance can be extracted from HDD only ZFS systems when all external bottlenecks are removed?

To answer this, the team engineered a directly attached, non-networked testbed: a 60 drive ZFS configuration based on Toshiba’s MG11ACA24TE 24 TB HDDs, organised as 6 × RAIDZ2 virtual devices (vdevs) – 8 data + 2 parity – deployed in an AIC SB407-VA platform and tuned to avoid external throughput bottlenecks. By excluding network interfaces and SSD based caching layers, the system exposes the true, native behaviour of RAIDZ2 under sustained load, providing insight into what users can realistically expect when designing large ZFS pools for bulk storage scenarios.

Download the whole lab report here.