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Help Me Choose: Hard Drives and Solid-State Drives

Help Me Choose: Hard Drives and Solid-State Drives
As an enterprise systems user, you are most concerned about the security of your data and the reliability of the medium holding that data.

Dell puts its Enterprise Hard Drive and Solid State Drive offerings through a rigorous validation process before they are ever considered as additions to our line of server and storage systems. Dell has stringent drive specifications for performance, duty cycles, Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) and rotational vibration, which are all necessary for an Enterprise-level environment .These types of exacting specifications must be met before we will make them available for customer usage.

Performance and Cost varies among the different HDD and SSD offerings. Please refer to the individual tabs below to assess the impacts in your applications.

HDD Recommendations

Hard Disk Drives for Dell Enterprise server and storage products are available in several different types, including Mission Critical (10K & 15K) Performance Optimized, Business Critical (7.2K) Capacity Optimized.

Generally speaking, the Mission Critical (MC) or Performance Optimized drives (10K and 15K SAS) are used in those application requiring the highest reliability and performance and are only available in the 2.5” small form factor. Business Critical (BC) or Capacity Optimized drives (7.2K Nearline SAS and SATA) may provide much higher capacities, but lower reliability and performance when compared to Mission Critical. They are available in both 2.5” small form factor and 3.5” large form factor. There is a fundamental transition occurring in the HDD industry. The standard size of a basic unit of data (a sector on the drive) is changing from 512 bytes to 4K bytes. Fortunately there are ways to maintain the 512 byte sector size, so that both are available into the future.

Beginning in late 2009, accelerating in 2010, and hitting mainstream in 2011 for client-based HDDs, hard drive companies began migrating away from the legacy sector size of 512 bytes to a larger, more efficient sector size of 4,096 bytes, generally referred to as 4K sectors, and now referenced as Advanced Format by IDEMA (The International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association). Enterprise HDDs are also moving to embrace this format, but will be slower to adopt. The first Advanced Format enterprise HDD became available in 2012, with a limited set in 2013 and a more general distribution in 2014 and beyond.

Customers have been using applications and operating systems / file systems built on 512 bytes (512n) for decades. This move to 4K byte sector size will impact those software stacks and will result in additional validation work as well as possible structural changes to software as the transition is made. New, higher capacity drives will need to be created in this 4K format. Recognizing that customers may be reluctant to make a change like this quickly, an emulation model of these drives has been created – the drive is built from 4K technology, but allows for 512 byte addressing and transfer at the interface. These drives are known as 512e.
Below is a table describing these concepts:
Format type Bytes per sector value Bytes per physical sector value
512n 512 512
512e 512 4,096
4Kn 4,096 4,096
  • There are many aspects of modern computing systems that continue to assume that sectors are always 512 bytes. The Dell HDD offering contains 512n drives, 512e drives, and drives in the 4Kn format. The 512n format is available for customers interested in maintaining the same drive type they have used over time. The 512e drives provide a 512 byte sector size for those capacities not available in 512n. The 4Kn formatted drives are for those customers interested in adopting the latest, highest capacity HDDs and for those getting prepared for the future direction of the HDD industry. Note that 512 byte/sector addressing will continue as a recognized and supported format for many years into the future. The share of drives formatted as 4Kn could continue to remain small and the newest, highest capacity HDDs now and on the roadmap will also be available in 512e sector format.

HDD Recommendations

  1. In late April 2017, Dell has introduced a new 2.5” form factor 900GB 15K 512e 12Gbps SAS HDD with Enhanced Cache to boost Read performance in addition to the Advance Write Cache that comes standard in this family. TurboBoostTM (trademark of Seagate Inc) Enhanced Cache was Seagate’s major performance enhancement to standard enterprise performance HDD design (10K & 15K RPM rotational speed). This new 512e drive integrates small amount of eMLC NAND as cache, reducing latencies for significantly faster, predictable response times. Rather than constructing storage solutions with a mixture of discrete HDDs and SSDs, TurboBoost can often provide the best of both worlds. At the very least, TurboBoost can help to improve general work productivity through greatly improved availability of hot data (the data most frequently sought by the host) and greatly reduced IOPS response time.

    • Hot data gets copied from magnetic media into NAND cache. Subsequent requests for this data by the host can then be fulfilled far faster from flash memory than from rotating magnetic platter (media/disk). As the cache fills up, the least hot files will retire from NAND to make room for more data while the original files remain accessible from the disk media if needed. With TurboBoost technology, the seek and rotational latency part of a conventional drive’s read process often vanish, because if data resides in NAND, there is no spinning media to navigate.
  2. Enhanced cache HDD benefits vary by applications - the greater the workload, the more effective they are. Ideal for building new high-performance servers, manage multiple transactions quickly, or drop-in replacements as the feature is active full time and does
    not require any enablement from host.

    • Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI)
    • Online Transaction Processing (OLTP)
    • Webservers
    • Small Database Query
    • Exchange Workloads
    • Random Read/Write Tasks

    For more detail on sample performance results per drive capacity, please view this comparison document.

SSD Recommendations

Below are the categories of enterprise SSDs Dell EMC offers:

  1. Write Intensive (WI)

    50/50 read/write workloads with highest endurance. This is generally recommended for running HPC, Database logging, and caching workloads.

  2. Mix Use (MU)

    70/30 read/write workloads with medium endurance. This is generally recommended for running e-mail/messaging, OLTP, and E-commerce workloads.

  3. Read Intensive (RI)

    90/10 read/write workloads with lower endurance. This is generally recommended for running database warehousing, media streaming, and VOD workloads.

  4. Boot Optimized (Boot)

    Lowest cost/small capacity SSDs designed to be used as a boot device in servers. Low endurance. Appropriate for all workloads.

  5. Host Interface

    Dell EMC enterprise SSDs support the following options:

  6. SATA SSD

    SATA SSDs are based on the industry standard SATA interface. SATA SSDs provide reasonable performance for enterprise applications where performance is not paramount but minimizing cost is.

  7. Value SAS SSD

    Developed by Toshiba Memory Corporation, value SAS is a new class of SAS SSD that leverages the PowerEdge SAS server infrastructure to deliver better performance, latency, and reliability than SATA SSDs, at a comparable price. These drives are lower cost and have lower performance than standard SAS SSDs, positioning their performance characteristics between SATA and standard SAS. Value SAS is an easy replacement for SATA SSDs and provide greater value for most enterprise applications.

  8. SAS SSD

    SAS SSDs are based on the industry standard SAS interface. SAS SSDs combine superior reliability, data integrity, and data fail recovery making them better than both SATA SSD and Value SAS SSD for applications requiring the highest performance using SAS/SATA drives. Price is higher, but if performance is a strong requirement, then standard SAS SSDs is warranted.

  9. PCIe SSD

    The Dell EMC PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD is a high performance solid state storage device that enables IOPS performance of up to 2000X more than conventional rotating hard drives.
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