Computer chip on hard drive platter surface.

Ethernet 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 “Ethernet Cloud” drives.

	Cloud Storage
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.
The market pressures on cost to build, feed, and maintain these massive banks of data are driving innovation in every component of the technology supply chain.
Hard drive manufacturers have responded with an all-new drive type for cloud applications—what we are calling the “Ethernet Cloud” class drive.

Essentially, what this does is allow each and every drive to speak IP directly, making each drive capable of becoming an independent node on the network.
This is a work in progress, and it will be interesting to see how it is adopted and where it will play.
The hard drive manufacturers are participating in technology development consortiums to speed adoption of this potentially game-changing technology.

Feature Table

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.

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

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