Enterprise Drives: Simply Better For Pros
By Jim Bask
If you could travel back in time to the early ’80s and survive all of the hair spray, you’d might realize that a year’s supply of hair products would be cheaper than a gigabyte of hard disk storage. Today, you can get the same capacity for less. Because you can pile up terabytes for the price of a family dinner at a local restaurant, it’s tempting to buy the least expensive, consumer-grade hard disk drives (HDDs), especially when enterprise-grade drives of the same capacity cost noticeably more.
Not all gigs are created equal. In the right circumstances, enterprise-grade drives are worth their weight in gold, and they belong in far more environments than just the racks of a data center. Let’s examine why hard working professionals like you might need professional, enterprise-grade storage.
Built For The Long Haul
Consumer-grade hard drives don’t have to work very hard. A day of checking email, scrolling through social media, and light Web surfing isn’t very taxing. Hard drive manufacturers know this, so they produce desktop and laptop HDDs with lower endurance ratings.
Enterprise-grade hard drives, on the other hand, are designed for heavy lifting and often operate non-stop in certain environments. To give you a rough idea of an enterprise-grade drive’s durability, let’s review the specifications for the enterprise-class HGST Ultrastar 7K6000, a 6TB drive. The Ultrastar’s MTBF (mean time between failures, a common measure of reliability) stands at 2 million hours. Reflecting this, HGST bestows the Ultrastar with a five-year warranty.
Made For RAID
Consumers may not understand the technology behind redundant arrays of independent disks (RAIDs), but you don’t need a Computer Science degree to understand that data redundancy is essential for protecting project files. Enterprise-grade drives are typically built with the assumption that they’ll be used in a RAID, so they have robust error correcting built in.
Additionally, enterprise-grade drives typically include features to help thwart the impact of rotational vibration (RV). Every motor generates vibration, including those inside of hard drives. With multiple drives inside of a RAID enclosure, those vibrations can accumulate enough to cause read and write errors within the drive, much like when a record needle skips on a vinyl platter.
Made For You
As we mentioned, the common assumption is that enterprise-grade hard drives only belong in IT departments or in giant data centers full of thousands of servers. While these are good places to find such drives, some enterprise-grade HDDs are purpose-built units made to aid a certain type of professional. This is why all G-Technology Studio-series solutions use HGST enterprise-grade drives. Once you begin to make a living at your creative work, you want a drive that is tested in environments that are always on to be ready whenever you are. A drive with additional error correcting features will also help reduce the loss of client data to errors and failure. Professional work requires professional drives.
Next time, we’ll focus on why creative pros may want to stop hunting for a bargain and start searching for drives that are made to help them succeed.
GâTechnology external hard drives serve as an element of an overall backup strategy. It is recommended that users keep two or more copies of their most important files backed up or stored on separate devices or online services.