Enterprise-class versus Desktop-class Hard Drives

Enterprise-class versus Desktop-class Hard Drives
Revision 1.0
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Introduction
In today’s economic landscape server system integrators are challenged to balance data and
system reliability with cost. It is important to balance the type, capacity, and number of hard
drives in a system with the requirements of data integrity and availability.
This paper provides a technical explanation of the differences between enterprise-class and
desktop-class hard drives to provide system integrators with the information they need to
determine their enterprise hard drive requirements.
Enterprise versus Desktop Systems
Desktop systems are generally focused on running client applications with disk I/O operations
supporting operating system load and runtime requirements as well as program/application load
and runtime requirements. In many of these implementations client data is not stored locally, but
is accessed across a network where data is stored on a file or storage server.
Enterprise-class server systems not only rely on operating system and application load and
runtime support, but also may provide application and/or storage services to the network, which
requires large capacity data storage that is always available and reliable.
The usage models for desktop systems and enterprise systems results in very different
requirements for hard drives, which in turn influences the robustness of hard drive design, the
implementation of features to enhance reliability, and the related costs. The table below
provides an outline of the requirement differences for desktop and enterprise class systems.
Each of these requirements is described in the following section.
Requirement Desktop Enterprise
Operational
Availability
8 hours/day - 5 days/week 24 hours/day - 7 days/week
Work Load
10 - 20% 100%
Cost
Sensitivity
Very sensitive to low cost
Moderately sensitive, balanced with
requirements for reliability, availability, and
data integrity.
Performance
Low to Moderate High
Reliability
Moderate:
1. Outage affects only one user
a. Critical data is not usually
stored locally
b. Higher Tolerance for long
error recovery timeout
2. Lower Mean Time Between Failure
Acceptable
High:
1. Outage affects multiple users
2. Higher Mean Time Between Failure
3. Intolerance for long Error Timeout
Data Integrity
Moderately desirable (a bit corruption may
result in system lockup or critical data loss
on one system)
Highly Desirable (a bit corruption may result in
catastrophic critical data loss to multiple
clients)