Desktop, Nearline and Enterprise Disk Drives: Deltas by Design
Willis Whittington, Senior Manager Product Marketing, Seagate Technology

For the past twenty five years the storage marketplace has been divided into two major categories namely  “Desktop” and “Enterprise”.  Recently, a third player variously known as “Nearline”, “Reference” or “Business Critical” has evolved to provide a low cost, high capacity storage solution for Enterprise data that no longer needs to exist in a high availability transactional processing environment, but must maintain 24 x 7 availability as a reference or backup resource.  Each of these classes of drives requires a unique and specific set of attributes to fulfill its role.  This presentation will explore these differences and explain why you need to use the right drive for the right application.

For the past twenty five years the storage marketplace has been divided into two major categories namely “Desktop” and “Enterprise”.  Recently, a third player variously known as “Nearline," “Reference” or “Business Critical” has evolved to provide a low cost, high capacity storage solution for Enterprise data that no longer needs to exist in a high availability transactional processing environment but must maintain 24 x 7 availability as a reference or backup resource.  Each of these classes of drives requires a unique and specific set of attributes to fulfill its role.  This presentation will explore these differences and explain why you need to use the right drive for the right application.

Learning Objectives

• To make the student aware of the differences between the three classes of drives in terms of Performance, Capacity, Reliability, Data Integrity, Power Consumption, and Cost.
• To understand the risks and pitfalls of selecting a class 'x' drive in a class 'y' application.