Huawei ES3600 v3 NVMe SSD Review and Performance Analysis

Huawei ES3000 v3 marks the company's first entry into NVMe SSDs, offering 2.5‑inch and HHHL AIC form factors with capacities from 1.2 TB to 3.2 TB and two endurance versions (1 DWPD and 3 DWPD).

The drive targets enterprise workloads such as Oracle, MySQL, SQL Server, VMware/FusionSphere VMs, HPC, and big‑data analytics, and is also suitable for hot‑data caching and ServerSAN storage.

Testing was performed in the StorageReview enterprise lab using real‑world server, network, and power configurations. Benchmarks included TPC‑C‑style SQL Server OLTP (333 GB database, 15 000 virtual users) and SysBench MySQL OLTP, as well as synthetic fio workloads (4 K read/write and 8 K 70/30 read/write).

In the SQL Server test the ES3600 v3 achieved 3 154 TPS per VM (total 12 618 TPS) with an average latency of 11‑12 ms, outperforming most competitors except the Toshiba PX04P. In the MySQL benchmark it ranked second overall, delivering 6 671 TPS with an average latency of 19.19 ms and a 99th‑percentile latency of 40.92 ms.

Synthetic 4 K tests showed the drive reaching up to 741 266 IOPS read throughput and an average read latency of 0.344 ms. In 8 K 70/30 tests it sustained around 220 K IOPS and maintained average latencies near 1.15 ms, generally leading the field.

The review concludes that the ES3600 v3 provides solid performance for latency‑sensitive database workloads, offers broad compatibility with Windows Server and major Linux distributions, and delivers strong synthetic benchmark scores, though its SQL Server latency is slightly higher than the best competitors.

Pros: Multiple form factors, good SysBench scores, strong synthetic performance.

Cons: Slightly higher SQL Server latency, limited capacity up to 3.2 TB.

Bottom line: Huawei's first enterprise NVMe SSD delivers robust performance and compatibility, making it a viable choice for demanding database and storage applications.