Cost Optimized Cloud

Hard drive manufacturers design drives that will perform well for their largest customers, or sets of customers. This is why “classes” of drives exist.

Design Expectations

The information below is a high-level set of expectations the drive manufacturers have when designing, testing, and selling “cost-optimized cloud” drives.

Power On Hours	24 hrs/7 days (8760 POH)
Write / Read Ratio	35/65
Block Sizes	Random
Seek Profile	90% Random / 10% Sequential

Design Details

The “cloud,” as an application and specific market for hard drive manufacturers to serve, remains driven by the huge "internet companies" need for massive storage farms.
This need for huge scale has elicited drives designed for bulk storage but at lower costs than mainstream enterprise drives.

This is achieved primarily by "working up" from a desktop platform; the reliability specifications of cost-optimized cloud drives are understandably not as good as mainstream enterprise drives.
Cost-optimized cloud drives offer lower cost, but be sure to understand what you are buying. Testing may be a good idea as well to determine if the reliability level is acceptable in your case.

Drive Class Features

The table below is an excerpt from the HDSTOR Drive Comparison Table, which shows features (or lack thereof) of the different classes of drives, as well as relative performance, reliability, and cost.

	Cost Optimized Cloud
Production Screening?	NO
Rated for 24/7 Use?	YES
Fixed Shaft Spindle?	NO
RV Feed Forward Sensors?	SOME
Time Limited Retry Tables?	YES

	Cost Optimized Cloud
Workload Rating	HIGH
Firmware Tuning	Random Access/ RAID
Performance Capabilities	MEDIUM
Reliability Ratings	MEDIUM
Cost	MEDIUM