Use of 2.5" drives in a server - Enterprise or Laptop?

[blurngr]

Hi all,

We're acquiring several 1U servers with (8) 2.5" drive slots. Although we can use either SATA or SAS, there is a large price variance as soon as you order 16 or 24 of these drives, so we are looking at the 2.5" SATA interfaced drives.

I know that Seagate and WD both make "Enterprise" 2.5" drives, which are fast (10k and 15k RPM), but are also fairly expensive.

What issues would we run into using 7200RPM 2.5" non-Enterprise drives? By the way, these will be hooked up to a RAID controller (though, they may just be configured as JBOD). These drives are almost $100 lower in price, per drive.

Thanks!

--
Anthony

 

[tokencode]

Using non-enterprise class drives in large RAID arrays in not recommended. They will need to support TLER to work probably otherwise you will have a very failure rate on the drives as they will not recover from a problem with an individual sector. In addition to this the MTBF on enterprise class drives will be significantly better. See if you can find yourself 2.5" near-line SAS drives, these are esentially enterprise class 7200RPM SAS drives thats should be cheaper than the 10/15k 2.5" drives but will support TLER and provide a good MTBF.