Other Factors
Moving Into the Lite
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Several other criteria help differentiate nearline lite and desktop drive lines. The chart below will help to give an at-a-glance comparison.
In general, enterprise drives will outperform desktop drives. However, NLL models are essentially built on client-drive foundations, like an SUV built on a truck frame. The differences between the two often come down to a combination of component quality and firmware. One sees the superior component quality reflected in the warranty coverage period and particularly the 25% higher MTBF. Higher performance is largely due to firmware improvements that allow for more efficient processing of enterprise-type workloads.
We’ve already touched on RV tolerance as an NLL differentiator, and the benefits of this will become more obvious in settings where five or more drives are used in the same enclosure. Of course, as drive counts go up, power consumption becomes more important. Client drives have few power management features in general. Drives designed for the enterprise should improve on this.
In the case of Seagate, the Constellation CS series employs PowerChoice™ technology, featuring more aggressive low-consumption idle and standby modes. By making “downtime” more granular and assessing incoming command types, Seagate can more efficiently select how to lower drive activity. The process requires no host interaction, creates zero performance impact, and saves about 2W of average operational power.

The Seagate Instant Secure Erase option should be familiar to anyone deploying substantial numbers of drives across an enterprise. The perennial problem with drive fleets is how to repurpose or dispose of them. This step in a drive’s lifecycle is fraught with security risks and significant drains on IT time resources. Simply put, conventional drive wiping methods are labor-intensive and prone to administrator mistakes. Instant Secure Erase uses cryptographic key technology and remote management to make the nearly instantaneous cryptographic scrambling of all drive data permanent. Data remains on the drive, but the key necessary to unscramble the data gets deleted — a process that is incredibly faster and more effective than rival methods.
Then there are enterprise-class firmware features such as Idle Read After Write (iRAW), which uses idle time to verify the integrity of recently written data, checking written data against a source copy in cache. When errors are found, the sector gets rewritten. Another related feature is Error Recovery Control, which cooperates with a RAID controller to provide better reporting of data errors and minimize the resources wasted in “false positive” RAID rebuilding.
5. The Right Drive for the Job
Whether they know it or not, all users, business and consumer alike, face challenging conditions for their storage. As data storage and accessibility continues to gain importance in all spheres, having drives able to handle performance and reliability demands becomes paramount. Nowhere is this more true than when building the foundation for cloud storage services, no matter the size.