SearchStorage.co.UK Research Library

This paper compares the benefits and challenges involved with the development of high-density packaging, signaling, and management of hundreds of 2.5-inch small form factor disk drives and makes comparisons to the traditional disk arrays previously mentioned. The resulting analysis details a high-density storage array with much finer tuning, sparing, and I/O granularity, extremely high aggregate bandwidth (on the order of several gigabytes per second), impressive transaction rates (on the order of tens of thousands of random I/O operations per second from the disk media), very low average wait times in disk queues, low average response time, and exceptionally low power consumption. These characteristics are simply a result of a very large population of disk drives, assuming good engineering practices in the development of the array implementation.