Hello,

Yes there will be a big difference. The reason a 15k is faster than a 10k is the number of reads and writes that can occur on a single rotation of the platter. For example in one rotation moment on a 15K we get an arbitrary 6 writes this will equal 4 writes on a 10k drive. This is 50% better per rotation time . What you need to consider is do you really want to use local SATA disk. We normally do this to prevent heavy swap I/O over the SAN. You can prevent this by using the correct memory resource on the host. I have almost not vmdk swapping and I don't have any local disk, it all boot from SAN. The other thing to think about is RAID 1 will cost 50% on every write operation, this will not be optimal for a swap vmdk. Ram and tuning is the correct way to deal with these issues.

p.s. I would chose SAS over SATA for this purpose.

Message was edited by: mike.laspina