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Primary and Secondary storage
Please advise,
What is the difference between what hard drive manufacturers rate as home use drives and enterprise drives?
The way I understand it is that home use drives are designed for running 8 hour days 5 day weeks where as enterprise drives are designed to run 24/7. Would this be correct?
Now is where it gets confusing, I notice enterprise drives are for 24/7 use but hard drive manufacturers say they shouldnt be used as a primary drive yet in my Dell Dimension 8400 it was shipped with an enterprise drive already which is the main primary drive. I havent had any problems with this at all, infact its been great.
What is the difference between what hard drive manufacturers rate as home use drives and enterprise drives?
The way I understand it is that home use drives are designed for running 8 hour days 5 day weeks where as enterprise drives are designed to run 24/7. Would this be correct?
Now is where it gets confusing, I notice enterprise drives are for 24/7 use but hard drive manufacturers say they shouldnt be used as a primary drive yet in my Dell Dimension 8400 it was shipped with an enterprise drive already which is the main primary drive. I havent had any problems with this at all, infact its been great.
There are no specifically adhered to specifications that differentiate one class from another. Enterprise drives tend to be scsi type while the standard desktop drive tend to be IDE or SATA. Low end servers routinely use desktop IDE drives SATA drive. The primary difference is performance and durability. SCSI and now SATA use something called native command queing allowing them the que up commands and execute them in a fashions that’s most efficient making then suitable for multi-user environments. IDE drive will execute commands in the order that they are received not necessarily the best solution but in a single user desktop environment its not such an issue unless you send many simultaneous commands to it. With regards to the ontime SCSI can tolerate extended use over extended periods of time something which desktop IDE drives don’t. Again this is not an issue because desktop drives are seldom exposed to such sustained punishment. Leaving any drive including a desktop drive 24/7 is not an issue. Ironically it when you turn them on that they are exposed to the most stress. Power requirements are sometimes 10 times as high on spin up then normal running. That is when most drives fail on startup. Unless there is a specific application requirement there is no need to shell out the extra money for the server drives. There is a desktop drive called the raptor which is highly recommended. It is also used in server systems. Its main feature is speed.
klbf
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2713 Posts
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Posted June 29th, 2006 12:00
from what i can deduct it is about drive life in hrs
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Upping the ante even further is Toshiba who have launched an 0.85-inch micro drive, which will enable even slimmer and smaller hard disk based devices, although almost all of the real action is still happening in the 1-inch space. On the flip side, hard drive capacity keeps on growing. The largest size 3.5-inch hard drive on the market is now 500Gb, with Maxtor now offering consumers and businesses a 1 Terabyte (1000 gigabyte) solution using twin 500Gb drives. Maxtor, who focus on desktop and enterprise class hard drives, have just released the MaXLine 500Gb drive. Whereas hard drives once had a mean time between failure (MTBF) of 50,000 hours, this drive is designed to be used 24x7 and has an MTBF of 1,000,000 hours. Maxtor have also released robust new hard drives for desktops and consumer electronics devices.
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http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/2873/52/
enterprise drives i guess are aimed for servers which have to have high reliablity although standard drives still have 5 year warranties
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