TYPE OF HARD DISK

Solid-state drive (SSD), may also be referred to as a solid-state disk, is

a data storage device that uses electronic circuits as memory to store
data persistently or in a non-volatile manner. Such that when
electricity is removed from the drive, the data is left intact. SSD drives
use compatible interface technologies similar to traditional block I/O
hard drives such as SATA/SAS drives. A key difference between
traditional SAS/SATA hard drives is that SSD drives do not have any
moving mechanical components, which distinguishes SSD drives from
traditional spinning magnetic disks. Compared to traditional hard
drives SSD drives are less susceptible to physical shock, are silent, and
have greater performance characteristics for read/write access. The
main drawback is that the cost per gigabyte is much greater than
traditional disk drives, and current SSD drives do not have the large
capacities as traditional SAS/SATA drives have available today.

Serial ATA (SATA) have replaced the standard parallel ATA or

commonly called IDE drives. IDE stands for Integrated Drive Electronics
which means that the disk control electronics is located on the drive
itself. This allows newer hard drives to be able be switched out more
easily or even utilized on different computers and still allow access to
the data. SATA drives spin at 5400-7800 RPM with data transfer rates
up to 3/GS (gigabits per second) with some newer drives have up to
6/GS transfer rates. SATA drives are the most common drive in the
market today, and offer the largest drive capacities available. SATA
drives today range up to two (2) Terabyte capacities and continues to
grow.

Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) drives have replaced traditional SCSI drives.
They utilize the enterprise SCSI command sets for advanced
functionality. The SAS drives usually have much higher spin rates
usually 10,000 to 15,000 rpm as well as faster access times. Key
differences between SATA and SAS include better device reliability and
increased performance for data access reads and writes. Drive
reliability is a major difference as SAS drives have a much greater
mean time between failures (MTBF). This means that SAS drives fail far
less frequently than SATA, IDE, and Near Line SAS drives. This and the
greater speed on data throughput make SAS the preferred hard drives
for server and mission critical devices even though the cost is much
higher than SATA or NL-SAS drives.

Near Line SAS (NL-SAS) are drives are basically enterprise SATA drives
with a SAS interface, R/W head and media (platter(s)). In addition,
they have the rotational speed (spin) of traditional enterprise-class
SATA drives (7800 or slower RPM) with the fully capable SAS interface
command sets. Compared to SATA, NL-SAS drives have additional
benefits such as the ability to connect a device to multiple computers,
slightly faster interface, up to 30%, compared to SATA, no STP (Serial
ATA Tunneling Protocol) overhead. Reliability ratings fall in the same
range as SATA drives so although they have many characteristics of SAS
drives, they are not SAS drives.
In short, near line SAS drives are basically big, cheap and slow SAS
drives targeted towards near line/occasional use storage solutions.
They can be cost effective solutions for storage space targeted towards
NAS (Networked Attached Storage) servers and other non-mission
critical, occasionally accessed data storage needs.

Summary The key factors in determining what type of Hard disk drive
to specify for a new server depends on the expected usage of the
server. The cost of the drives will depend mainly upon three key
metrics: speed, reliability and storage capacity requirements. For
mission critical servers or servers that utilize disk intensive
applications I would recommend utilizing SAS drives. For desktops, I
usually recommend SATA drives, unless there is a need for local access
and performance gains, such as some developers and architects. Disk
access and data throughput can be important and have a noticeable
impact upon the user. For non-critical storage, near line SAS drives are
usually good choices as the SAS compatible interface allows for more
seamless usage (command set) with server operating systems and array
controllers.