Rather than bombard you with statistics, let me tell you a story
Imagine if you have a new pop idol debuting her album. She’s nothing spectacular, she performs a song, takes 10-minute breaks in between to get water, an outfit change, and whatever pop idols do with their time. For the most part, she’s a hit! Usually pop idols have four or five years of expected popularity before a career-stopping event happens. Accidents and what-not, right?
Let’s continue her story – two years pass, and her popularity hasn’t declined. She’s working as hard as she was when she first debuted, but her audience has become increasingly unruly. A concert-goer thought it would be funny to throw a rock at her during her performance, and he does. It does stall her a bit but she was still able to finish her routine.
Soon after, her career began to plummet. Her managers didn’t suspect anything was wrong at the time. However, she began to stall more and more; her performance wasn’t to par as it used to be. Sometimes she would have to end her concerts early – a few times she started songs over again!
But then…
A super volcano erupts miles from her
This caused the earths tectonic plates to shift a mile outward, causing the mega quake of the century. It was unfortunate, because at the time she was engaging one of her more complex performances. One that needed much of her attention and concentration. The extra exertion from the mega quake threw her off balance to the point of unconsciousness, finally ending her career.
It’s a sad story, but this happens more often than most people would like to admit….
To hard drives, not pop idols.
Although every hard drive is different, the failure rate of drives increases as time passes. They can fail for almost any reason – from complete randomness, to mechanical failure. Sometimes it’s our fault though, we throw our own rocks and act like blissful managers.
But what if we had a drive that could account for the random acts of life? A pop idol that wears a full suit of Iron plate mail, and chain underneath.
The good news is we
do! These are known as
Enterprise Hard Drives
They're normally used in data centers, as you can imagine. Places that store sensitive information, like card processors, banks, and servers have an inherit need for reliability, where desktop drives (your standard idol) would break down much quicker. Imagine an idol that is well built, that doesn’t need 10-minute breaks. Where she can perform 100% of the time, all the time. Ones with *MTBF rating of 2 million hours (the higher the rating, the less likely the drive is to fail)
Benefits of using an Enterprise Drive
- Longer life expectancy
- Can handle 100% work capacity without degradation
- Can be indefinitely powered 24 hours a day / 7 days a week
- Similar performance, sometimes faster than Desktop drives
- Used Enterprise drives still have equal to better functionality that desktop ones.
- Much more durable and well built (some models have dual spindles)
- Able to handle vibrations without drive skipping.
*MTBF (mean time between failures) is a measure of how reliable a hardware product or component is. For most components, the measure is typically in thousands or even tens of thousands of hours between failures (Whatis.techtarget.com)
More Info:
http://www.45drives.com/products/hard-drives/why-w...
http://www.g-technology.com/blog/enterprise-drives...
Source:
http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/se...
http://whatis.techtarget.com/definition/MTBF-mean-...
ANY OPINIONS EXPRESS BY OUR AUTHORS ARE NOT THAT OF CENTRALVALLEYCOMPUTERPARTS.COM