Why Are Hard Drives Built Differently — and Does It Matter?

The engine of the Bugatti Veyron

A minivan and a Bugatti Veyron are both just cars, right?

Would you drive a minivan around the race track? Doesn’t quite sound like the most thrilling experience, does it? A formula race car around a race track — now that sounds like a thrill!

Much like a car, choosing the right hard drive for your application can be critical to your experience.

It’s crucial to think about how the specific design of a hard drive varies to deliver the right performance, reliability and overall experience for each different application.

But I love my workhorse!

Of course, you love your minivan and you trust it to haul you and your kids all over to school, work, gymnastics, space camp and on trips to your nearest national park. So you might be satisfied to drive a minivan around the racetrack.

But consider the ramifications. As you speed around the track you’re bound to get worried that the tires will blowout any minute (they’ll sure get hot quick!), and you’re not going to be able to take the corners fast enough to avoid being lapped by other racers. The van will be leaning, you’ll feel prone and loose in it rather than balanced and protected like you would in a proper racing machine.

Why is this? You know your minivan leverages the same basic components as a sports car, and might be made by the same automaker. So why are the two so different?

Of course, it comes down to the demands of high-speed racing versus suburban streets. For either situation, you want your vehicle to have right combination of components — those are what make one car a sports car, and the other a minivan.

Right combination of chassis, heads, media, firmware

Use the right hard drive for the right jobThe same thing applies to hard drives. At Seagate our engineers make sure we have the right combination of chassis, heads, media, firmware and other features so that no matter what application our drives are going into, we have the right performance and you’ll have the right experience, appropriate for your application.

Seagate engineers perform months and months of testing to make sure each type of drive really performs the way that we know they need to when they’re put in each very different environment.

Rotational Vibration is a prime example

For example, different drives perform differently when subjected to Rotational Vibration (RV) — the kind of vibration a drive will experience when it’s put in an environment with lots of other drives that all spin up a lot for high workloads.

Besides the different media, heads, electronics specified to fit each job performed by our varied drives like Desktop HDD, NAS HDD, Surveillance HDD or Enterprise NAS HDD, different specialized motor designs, firmware features and special RV sensors make a huge difference in how any drive responds to vibrations and performs in an always-on, multi-drive, high data-intensity environment.

In the end, if you’re a system integrator, IT manager, cloud builder or any kind of technology decision maker, there’s one thing you really want to know: what is your application environment, and what hard drive is built for that environment. Understanding and heeding the answers will keep your operation running at peak productivity. But using the wrong drive in the wrong application could be a huge detriment to the success of your storage solutions.

2016-02-06T02:13:24+00:00

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