How to Choose the Right Hard Drive for the Task at Hand

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Henry

Henry Newman

Over at Enterprise Storage Forum, our favorite Storage Pundit Henry Newman from Instrumental is back with a helpful guide on how to choose the right hard drive for your application profile.

Choosing a hard drive requires attention to detail about the drive and about how you are going to use it. The how you are going to use it is a big deal, as it is not just the application reads and write but also includes the file system, file system layout for thing such as logs, the storage controller or appliance framework, the protocols and even something as simple the number of failures you have. Think about this if you have a RAID device with SSDs with a write budget and one drive fails. You have to spend a lot of time and writes rebuilding parity or re-mirroring. This is something you might not have thought about when calculating your write budget. The whole concept of a write budget was unheard of 5 years ago except for a few people serious about flash drives. Now we are starting to see this concept applied to consumer spinning disk and, with hybrid drives in the future, who knows. All of this means that we are going to need to spend more time thinking about drives for every problem from consumer to enterprise drives, and think about how these boxes will really be used to make sure we get the right drive for the right job.

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