PaulAlcorn :
....Taking a consumer level drive and putting an enterprise sticker on it does not make it an enterprise drive, which is why it is being advertised on a consumer website instead of directly to ya know, actual enterprises.
If you ignore the sticker for just a second and look at what is actually INSIDE the drive, which of the following fit it?
Enterprise drive: SAS
Consumer drive: SATA
Enterprise drive: 10k or 15K spindle speed
Consumer drive: 7200 spindle speed (or lower)
And most importantly data integrity:
Enterprise drive: error rate of 1 in 10^16 or better
Consumer drive: error rate of 1 in 10^15 or worse
It has the exact same error rating as their other drives; tacking an enterprise sticker on it and charging twice the price doesn't magically change that. It DOES however convince people who don't really know what they're doing to spend much more money then they need to.
@Deuce65, This is hardly the case of putting an enterprise sticker on a consumer drive. A bit of basic research easily proves all of your points to be incorrect. Every HDD manufacturer is creating enterprise SATA drives for this exact same target segment, with very similar specifications. The difference lies in the hardware reliability, the MTBF ratings, and the fact that enterprise equipment has RV (Rotational Vibration) sensors (and fw enhancements) to counteract the rigors of datacenter life. The key is power efficiency and bulk storage as the performance workloads are beginning to migrate more to flash. The environment you are describing may have been the case 5-10 years ago, but not today. Frankly, there has always been a distinction between tiers, such as mission-critical and nearline drives, it is just amplified in today's environment.
The drive has an operational shock rating of 70g. It has a vibration rating of .67 x,y, and z. To compare, take that same cheap seagate consumer drive I mentioned above (literally the cheapest large capacity consumer drive I could find), it has ratings of 80g, and .5 x, y, and z respectively. So THAT isn't it either.
And as for reliability, we already covered it's unrecoverable read error rate of 1 in 10^15, (probably the most important spec) literally orders of magnitude worse then any real enterprise drive.
Literally every single specification on this drive is right on par with the typical consumer drives already on sale for half the price\TB. Don't take my word for it, grab a spec sheet for a cheap drive and just go down the list.
Most telling of all that it was not really designed as an enterprise drive but as a consumer drive is that it has NO end to end error correction at all. None. Really? You're going to tell me that a drive with no error correction at all is going in your data center?
Now I will agree with you that drive makers are in fact targeting this market segment; HGST's parent company Western Digital has already realized that they can take their consumer drives and stick a red NAS sticker on it and call it enterprise and consumers will pay more money for the exact same drive.
There is a reason these types of drives are being marketed on consumer websites (first rule of marketing, if you're reading it, it's for you) and not to enterprises. Meanwhile, HGST does make real enterprise drives (something like the C15K600) but at over a dollar per GB, they don't waste time marketing them to consumers. On the other side of the coin, as I mentioned in my first post, data warehouses (who know how to read a spec sheet) aren't paying 65+ per TB when they can get the exact same thing for half the price. But consumers will as long as it has a nice, marketable name.