Abstract.............................................................................................................................................. 2

Introduction......................................................................................................................................... 2

Categories of server disk drives............................................................................................................. 2

Characteristics of disk drives................................................................................................................. 3

Small form factor and large form factor disk drives .............................................................................. 3

Disk drive capacity........................................................................................................................... 4

Disk drive performance..................................................................................................................... 4

Reliability........................................................................................................................................ 5

Drive qualification process.................................................................................................................... 6

Interconnect technology ........................................................................................................................ 7

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) ............................................................................................................... 7

SAS-2 ............................................................................................................................................. 8

Second generation Serial ATA (SATA) ................................................................................................ 8

Interconnect bandwidths and drive throughput..................................................................................... 8

Improved performance and reliability with RAID...................................................................................... 9

Advanced controllers ........................................................................................................................... 9

Solid state drives for servers.................................................................................................................. 9

HP solid state drive reliability requirements........................................................................................ 10

NAND over provisioning and wear-levelling.................................................................................. 10

Power loss protection .................................................................................................................. 10

Value, mainstream and performance SSDs........................................................................................ 11

SSD performance........................................................................................................................... 12

Conclusion........................................................................................................................................ 12

For more information.......................................................................................................................... 13

Call to action .................................................................................................................................... 13

Drive technology overview

technology brief, 3nd edition

Compaq BL10e Drive technology overview

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