IntroductionInnovative strategies in drive and drive controller design dramatically increase capacity, performance, and availability. This technology brief reviews these aspects of drive technology:
- Categories of server drives
- Key factors determining capacity, performance, and reliability in single drives
- Options available to connect drives to the system
- RAID to further increase performance and reliability
- Solid state drives
Categories of Server Drives
At HP, we have refined and expanded our drive family to three distinct categories: Entry, Midline, and Enterprise. These categories meet the needs of different environments for performance, reliability, and cost/capacity. Table 1 lists characteristics of these categories.
HP Entry drives have the lowest unit cost and give you a basic level of reliability and performance. They are best suited for non-mission-critical environments where I/O workloads are 40 percent or less. They are typically best suited for internal/archival storage or as boot drives for entry-level servers. Entry drives are only available with a Serial ATA (SATA) interface.
HP Midline drives give you larger capacity and greater reliability than Entry drives. Midline drives are more resistant to rotational and operational vibration, so they are better suited for use in multi-drive configurations. Midline drives are available with both SATA and Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interfaces.
HP Midline drives are for high-capacity applications such as external storage that may require increased reliability. Like Entry drives, however, Midline drives are for use in moderate workload environments. We do not recommend Entry or Midline drives for mission-critical applications.
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