How do I choose the right drive for my customer?

Q: How do you determine what type of drives to use for a customer?

About the author
Storage expert Kurtis Lindemann is the director of Technical Services for RoundTower Technologies, a storage service provider based in Cincinnati. Listen to the rest of Kurtis' answers on assessing a customer's storage capacity by downloading our storage capacity podcast.

It all comes down to performance requirements. There are tools that can be used, such as perfmon in Windows and sysstat or iostat in various flavors of UNIX, that can help you determine the IO rates for a particular environment. Next, make sure that for the given capacity, you have allocated enough spindles to meet the customer's performance requirements. A typical rule of thumb is that FC or SAS drives at 15,000 RPM can handle 180 IOPS while a 10,000 RPM drive can handle 120 IOPS. If you're concerned about performance at all, don't use SATA; that's the drive to use for archive and for applications where performance and reliability is not a concern. It's also worth noting that if performance is the customer's only concern, flash drives are starting to become available in high-end enterprise arrays. While they are expensive, nothing can come close to competing with them in terms of performance.

Return to the storage capacity assessment FAQ guide and read the rest of Kurtis' expert responses.


This was first published in January 2008

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