Category: Hard Drives

Seagate Enterprise Hard Drives & SSDs

Enterprise Hard Drives & SSDs offer a simple yet versatile selection of data storage. During the Covid-19, we have seen the surge in Data Center SSD demands globally. In the last two year, rapidly growing demands of data center NVME SSDs, are efficiently catering to the needs.

For high-reliability solutions for servers, storage systems, and business-centric NAS systems, Seagate offers new series of Seagate Exos Series Enterprise Hard Drives. The working of a system depends on its hard drive’s storage capacity. An extended space and the storage process are the considering factors.

One of the most selling, Seagate SSDs have low-latency, high-speed, reliable data storage solutions to enhance server performance and efficiency. The organizations maintaining the huge data centers, generally ask the following questions before advancing with their storage capacity.

• Which hard drives are marketed for enterprise?
• Are NVME SSDs more reliable?
• How long do enterprise SSDs last?
• Is it better to have both SSD and HDD?
• Do Seagate SSDs provide a cost-effective solution for data centers?

To ensure faster data transfer, a high capacity storage is a must. With the increasing virtual storage demands, the need for enterprise drives and SSDs have increased.

The post provides an overview of the trending choices of SSDs for enterprises with considerate insight into the topic.

Enterprise Solid State Drive Overview

An enterprise SSD (enterprise solid-state drive, or enterprise solid-state disk) is a device that stores data persistently. It caches data temporarily in nonvolatile semiconductor memory and is intended for use in storage systems, servers, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices.

Enterprise SSDs generally use NAND flash memory and deliver higher performance. They are power-saving, eco-friendly hard-disk drives (HDDs), for heavy workloads.

Optimized with the latest  SAS interface they can be used for next-generation server and storage applications.

Enterprise SSDs are available in a variety of form factors and interface types. Interface options include serial ATA (SATA), serial-attached SCSI (SAS), and PCI Express (PCIe) to transfer data to and from the central processing unit (CPU).

Form factors include a 2.5-inch drive that fits into the same slot as an HDD, a half-height half-length (HHHL) add-in card, or an M.2 module that plugs into a computer’s PCIe bus.

An enterprise SSD is capable of handling I/O-intensive workloads such as database files, indexes and logs, data analytics, and other high-transaction operations.

Types of Seagate Hard Drives & SSDs

Enterprise SSDs are suitable for high-performance Tier 0 computing, server, and storage systems that require high levels of performance and reliability. The drives like Exos Hard Drives, and Nytro SSD Series offer advanced storage

Read/ Write High-Performance Seagate SSDs

The drives create a balance of cost, performance, and endurance for write and read mixed applications, such as media streaming, data warehousing, and web servers.

Seagate Enterprise Read Intensive SSD

The drives are reliable cost-sensitive and good for read-intensive applications characterized by infrequent write operations or predominantly large blocks & sequential data pattern workloads

Seagate Enterprise Write Intensive SSD

These drives provide enterprise-class solid-state storage providing high levels of performance and endurance for a wide range of write-intensive applications, from Big Data Analytics, HPC (High-Performance Computing) to mainstream server and storage systems.

SAS SATA and SSD Technologies

A solid-state drive is a type of non-volatile storage device for persisting electronic data. Unlike a hard disk drive or magnetic tape, the SSD contains no moving parts that can break or fail. Instead, an SSD uses silicon microchips to store data, so it requires less power and produces less heat.

Most of today’s SSDs are based on flash memory technology. Each device includes a flash controller and one or more NAND flash memory chips.

SATA-based SSDs can achieve much lower latencies. SAS drives deliver somewhat better performance; they provide throughputs up to 12 Gbps and IOPS averaging between 200,000 and 400,000. Even so, lower IOPS are not unusual. In some cases, SAS latency rates have fallen below 100 µs, but not by much.

Not going too much into the technical details, if we measure the data transfer speed, Read/ write operations, compatibility, and throughput, the NVME M.2 SSDs are best to use in a networked environment like big data centers.

Seagate and Samsung  PCIe® Gen 4-enabled SSDs are among the top choices. The drives have enabled enterprise SSD manufacturers to use lower-endurance NAND flash options such as multi level cell MLC, triple-level cell (TLC), and 3D NAND. Advantages of the lower-endurance forms of NAND flash include lower cost and higher capacity. Is it better to have both SSD and HDD?

Note: As per the expert’s analysis, NVME M.2 PCI 4.0 enabled are more reliable for enterprises

Which SSD Is Better SATA, SAS or NVMe?

The NVMe protocol has become the industry standard for supporting solid state drives and other non-volatile memory subsystems. NVMe speeds are substantially better than those of traditional storage protocols, such as SAS and SATA.

Essentially, it allows flash memory to operate as an SSD directly through the PCIe interface rather than going through SATA.

NVMe drives can come in both M.2 or PCIe card form factors. With both form factors, the component is connected electrically to the PC via PCIe rather than SATA.

The NVM Express Base Specification defines both a storage protocol and a host controller interface optimized for client and enterprise systems that use SSDs based on PCIe. PCIe is a serial expansion bus standard that enables computers to attach to peripheral devices.

Expansion slots that adhere to the PCIe standard can scale from one to 32 data transmission lanes. The standard defines seven physical lane configurations: x1, x2, x4, x8, x12, x16 and x32. The configurations are based on the number of lanes; for example, an x8 configuration uses eight lanes. The more lanes there are, the better the performance — and the higher the costs.

The PCIe version is another factor that affects performance. In general, each version doubles the bandwidth and transfer rate of the previous version, so the more recent the version, the better the performance. For instance, PCIe 3.0 delivers a bandwidth of 1 Gbps per lane; PCIe 4.0 doubles that bandwidth to 2 Gbps; and PCIe 5.0 doubles the bandwidth again to 4 GBps.

Is it better to have both SSD and HDD?

The benefits of hard disk drives are that they are a proven technology, and are frequently less expensive than a solid-state drive for the same amount of storage. Currently, HDDs are also available with more storage space, hyper-scale efficiency, and lowest TCO.

Solid-state drives deliver faster load times for games, applications, and movies. Because of the technology they use, SSDs are lighter and better able to withstand movement and droppage. In addition, solid-state drives use less energy, allowing computers to run cooler.

However, the lifespan of the HDD is more than SSDs as SSDs are using Nand technology which burns out faster than electromagnetic technology.

To maintain affordability and long life, it is better to use the combo of HDD and SSDs for enterprises. However, some gaming applications and cryptographic solutions prefer SSDs only.

Solid State Drives typically offer read and write speeds 10-30 times faster than 7,200 revolutions per minute (rpm) hard drive, which is best for games.

Choosing the Right SSDs for Your Cloud: Data center SSDs

SSDs bring speed, durability, and flexibility to enterprise workloads such as AI, machine learning, and other advanced applications. But, SSDs are not a one-size-fits-all solution. We’ve compiled a list of important considerations to help choose data center SSDs a little more familiar to you:

Form Factors

The solid-state drives come with no moving parts. Hence the same SSD is available in different versions. Form Factor is the best way to measure their performance.

Interface Options

SATA, SAS, and NVMe are three interfaces for enterprise solutions. NVMe is the newest protocol and is known for its low latency and high bandwidth, accelerating performance for enterprise workloads.

Endurance Considerations

Flash technology supports a limited number of read/ write operations. Therefore, choosing too high of an endurance SSD for a read-mostly application will unnecessarily increase costs, while choosing too low of an endurance SSD for a high-write workload could result in premature application failure.

Error Handling, Power Protection, and End-to-End Data Protection

A true differentiator between consumer and enterprise SSDs is error case handling. Unexpected power failure, random bit flips in the controller or data path, and other flash errors can all cause data corruption which a data center can’t afford

Power Usage

The solid-state drives often can be tuned in place to optimize power or performance envelopes. By intelligently utilizing these options, you can realize significant data center-wide power savings or performance gain.

Monitoring and Management

Various tools to monitor health, performance, and utilization from a centralized platform will save time and reduce the stress that can help you set compatibility of SSDs with other data center hardware.

Depending on the parameters discussed above, you can choose the best SSD. For more information , browse our website at: https://www.shopsaitech.com/

Best Seagate Enterprise Series HDD & SSDs 2021

Depending on the storage types, some of the drives that are for the enterprises are:

Seagate Exos ENTERPRISE Drives

Designed to handle workloads up to 550 TB per year, Seagate Exos Enterprise Drives offer the highest level of reliability, durability, capacity, power efficiency, and performance for a multitude of Datacenter-specific applications.

Link Speed: SATA 6Gb/s Max Workload: 550TB per year Spin Rate: 7200 RPM Warranty: 5 years

Seagate Skyhawk Surveillance Drives

Optimized for DVRs and NVRs, SkyHawk video hard drives are tuned for 24×7 workloads. Equipped with enhanced Image Perfect firmware, SkyHawk helps to minimize dropped frames and downtime.

Link Speed: SATA 6Gb/s Max Workload: 180TB per year Spin Rate: 7200 RPM Warranty: 3 years.

Toshiba Enterprise Drives

Toshiba Enterprise HDDs provide unsurpassed quality and reliability for demanding 24/7 server and storage deployments.

Link Speed: SATA 6Gb/s Max Workload: 550TB per year Spin Rate: 7200 RPM Warranty: 5 years.

Micron 5300 Pro SSD

Engineered on industry-leading 64-layer 3D NAND, the Micron 5300 SSD delivers best-in-class performance and capacity.

Warranty: 5 years

Seagate Nytro SSD

Mainstream endurance for mixed enterprise workloads.

Please note: Seagate Nytro has gone EOL. Only limited quantities remain.

Conclusion

Enterprise SSDs have completely revolutionized the data center. While hard drives still have a bright future in data centers for storing massive amounts of data at scale with the best TCO, the unparalleled latency and bandwidth advantage of SSDs for high-speed databases and other applications are undeniable.

Exos X12, Samsung 970 Evo Plus, and Seagate Nytro are the latest SSDs that can serve the need of big data centers.

At Shop Saitech, all top brands of SSDs are available with 5 years warranty and at affordable prices. Check out for latest models of SSDs!