Hard Disk Technologies

HP Hewlett-Packard understands the details of the specific requirements of the customers so that HP can refine the offering of its products to provide ease and better facilitates its customers. The major hard disk technologies are Small computer System Interface (SCSI), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS), Parallel ATA also called E/IDE (ATA) and Serial ATA (SATA). The major factors that the customers should consider about in order to get best ROI on hard disk technology are the reliability, robustness, price and the performance.

These factors change very quickly with the passage of time and to compete in the market, the customers have to reevaluate these factors on regular basis. In workstations the mostly used hard disc technologies are the parallel ATA (E/IDE) and SCSI. Initially SCSI was called as SASI (Shugart Associates System Interface). Afterword for promoting the wider adoption of SASI standard, it was standardized by American National Standards Institute ANSI.

Number of devices that can be supported by SCSI Low-voltage differential LVD bus can reach up to sixteen. This means that one controller and fifteen disk drives. HP SCSI hard drives are developed as fault tolerant, reliable, robust and efficient. These HP hard drives are efficient and cost effective data storage media for installations of enterprises or the users that are performance focused.

Initially ATA was called IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics). ATA was mostly used in business and home personal computers. For making ATA more generic, it was revised later as “Advanced Technology Attach”. Each channel of IDE can accommodate up to 2 hard drives. There was need of a new architecture to further enhance the performance. The storage architecture that at first utilized the serial interface successfully was the fiber channel. It has resulted in markets of both SCSI & ATA evolved to follow suit. Parallel ATA technology’s evolution is Serial ATA. The aim of SATA technology is to overcome the IDE interface’s inherent limitations. It utilizes higher speed serial interface of 1.5 GB/sec, offers capabilities of hot swap and topology of point to point attach.

The SATA hard drives remove the configuration of “master slave” of the ATA devices and reduce the cabling related to disk in the chassis. The core products of SATA drive provide more functionality in comparison to the parallel ATA. Parallel SCSI’s evolution is SAS (Serial Attach SCSI). Both the SAS & SATA interfaces are protocol compatible and signal compatible. The users that deploy SAS in data storage solution or system can plug in the SATA devices in that same system. HP SCSI hard drives are developed as fault tolerant, reliable, robust and efficient. These HP hard drives are efficient and cost effective data storage media for installations of enterprises or the users that are performance focused.

There are many ways for the evaluation of the hard drives in terms of its reliability. The best evaluations methods are the AFR (Annual Fail Rate) and the MTBF (Mean Time between Failures). The SCSI hard drives are designed and developed for 24/7 operation, extended lifetimes service and more demanding working conditions. ATA hard drives are cost efficient data storage medium for applications that are non-critical. ATA hard drive’s successor is the SATA drives that have the features of enterprise applications. And SCSI hard disk drive’s successor is Serial Attached SCSI hard drives that have the system which is compatible with the Serial ATA hard disk drives.

For further details and online order, please visit ‘tape4backup.com’