Drives & storage

The drive is the one component in a server whose failure is predictable and can be planned for — provided it was chosen correctly to begin with. Listed here are SAS and SATA mechanical disks, SATA and SAS solid-state drives and NVMe drives, each with estimated IOPS and its compatible generation.

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13 parts

Prices are based on the global market average in euro.

Buying guide

IOPS matters more than capacity

A 10,000 rpm mechanical drive delivers roughly 180 operations per second; an ordinary server SSD exceeds 75,000. That gap is two to three orders of magnitude, not a few percent. For the OS volume, databases and virtual machines this number decides everything, not the gigabytes. Mechanical drives still have their place: archives, backups and large files, where the cheapest gigabyte wins.

The caddy is part of the drive

A bare drive will not seat in a hot-plug bay. The Gen8–Gen10 Smart Carrier and the Gen10-and-later Basic Carrier are not interchangeable, and they look similar. This is the single most common server-parts ordering mistake: the box arrives and none of the drives go in. Check the server generation before ordering, not the drive model.

In an array, everything matches

Members of a RAID array should share capacity and speed. If one is smaller, the controller treats every disk as that size and the rest of the capacity is wasted. It is also worth keeping a hot spare in the array: rebuilding a large array can take hours, and for that whole period you have no redundancy.

Frequently asked questions

Will an ordinary SATA desktop drive work in a server?

Electrically yes, but it is not advisable. A desktop drive is designed for eight-hour duty, not continuous operation, and its error handling conflicts with a RAID controller: on a bad sector it retries for tens of seconds, and the controller declares it dead and drops it from the array meanwhile. Server drives bound that behaviour with a time limit (TLER).

How much do power-on hours matter on a used drive?

It matters, but it is not the deciding number. A server drive is rated for hundreds of thousands of hours, so 20,000 hours is still young. More telling than hours are the reallocated-sector count and read-error rate in SMART. We disclose power-on hours for every drive and run a full surface test before shipping.

Can I fit NVMe in a Gen9 server?

Gen9 has no NVMe backplane. The only route is a PCIe add-in card carrying one or two NVMe drives through an expansion slot — it works, but it is not hot-plug and it consumes a PCIe slot. If NVMe genuinely matters to you, Gen10 is the first generation with a backplane for it.