A Look at 3.5" Hard Drives in the Enterprise

The phrase "never change a running system" is a common saying in the enterprise, but one of the few components that can be replaced with a different model is the hard drive. This Tom's Hardware article discusses the 3.5" hard drive—often seen as the backbone of performance in enterprise storage.

"HDDs still represent the backbone of performance storage in the enterprise space. We took the last four drive generations between 147GB and 600GB and compared performance and power efficiency.

"The Hitachi Ultrastar 15K147 was one of the first SAS 3 Gb/s hard drives made available back in 2005, although hard drives working at a 15,000 RPM spindle speed were introduced a few years earlier."