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.

Design Details:

The “cloud,” as an application and specific market for hard drive manufacturers to serve, remains driven by the huge “internet related” 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 – 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.

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.