Compaq ProLiant 1000 Drive technology overview - Page 3

HP Enterprise drives provide maximum reliability, highest performance, scalability, and error management under the most demanding conditions. They are the only class of drives designed for use at unconstrained I/O workloads and are intended for use in mission-critical applications such as large databases, e-mail servers, and CRM. Table 1 provides a side-by-side comparison of the three classes of HP server drives. Table 1. Categories of HP server disk drives General description Use environments Entry drives (ETY) Performance and reliability intended for entry-level servers, lowest unit cost Low I/O, non-mission critical usages - Boot disk - Entry server storage Midline drives (MDL) High capacity, lowest cost per gigabyte - External storage - Backups/archival - Redundancy Enterprise drives (ENT) Maximum reliability and performance using state of the art design - Mission critical - High I/O - Large database - e-mail/messaging Workload Reliability Interface Connectivity Designed for workloads < 40% SATA 1.5 and 3 Gb/s Single port Designed for workloads < 40%, 2 times Entry drive reliability SATA 3 Gb/s SAS 3 and 6Gb/s Single port Dual port Designed for near unconstrained workloads 3.5 times Entry drive reliability SAS 3 and 6 Gb/s Single and dual port RPM 5400 and 7200 7200 7200 10,000 and 15,000 Warranty 1 year 1 year 1 year 3 year Characteristics of disk drives This section identifies basic characteristics of industry standard disk drives and factors that affect them. Small form factor and large form factor disk drives HP disk drives for servers are available in both 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF) and 3.5-inch large form factor (LFF). In general, 2.5-inch drives are used when power savings and space savings are considered important. The smaller 2.5-inch drives can require as little as half the power and generate significantly less heat than 3.5-inch drives. LFF drives are better suited for implementations that require large single drive capacities and lower cost per gigabyte. HP provides two lines of Universal Carrier for disk drives: one for 2.5-inch form factor drives and one for 3.5-inch form factor drives. These carriers allow any hot-pluggable drive from a family to fit mechanically and electrically with HP ProLiant servers or storage products. This mechanical commonality extends to most SAS-based StorageWorks and HP Integrity server products as well. Thus, mixed HP Enterprise solutions can be supported by a common family of hard drives. Technological advances continue to change the product landscape, and disk drives are no exception. SFF drives have supplanted LFF drives as the primary storage form factor. Increases in data densities 3