What Hard Drive should you buy for your DAS?

Hard drives come in such wide varieties that it can be overwhelming to choose the right one. When it comes to direct-attached storage (DAS), making uninformed choices leads to low performance or even costly hard drives. Though not every hard drive is the same, here are the most common types you should look for when purchasing a DAS drive.

Types of DAS Hard Drives

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A single machine controls all  DAS storage devices attached to it, and the machine must authenticate and authorize any device attempting to access data. Servers and workstations can access DAS storage via a variety of devices, which include:

  1. Solid State Drives (SSD)

The solid-state drives store data using non-volatile electronic memory, distinguished by fast writing and reading times. The SSD can only access data if the DAS devices have the corresponding interfaces. SSDs can be divided into two types:

  • NVMe SSDs: powerful, quiet, and durable SSDs with reading and writing speeds as fast as 2500 MBps or higher. As the capacity of these disks increases, they become more expensive.
  • PCIe SSDs: They are durable, quiet, and portable, with speeds up to 400 MBps, which makes them ideal for transferring high-definition media files. Although these disks typically have smaller capacities, they are more expensive than HDDs.

SSDs usually outperform normal hard drives, especially budget SSDs, which have an advantage in reading and writing. Generally, SSDs can get super fast, so they make great additions to DAS models with slots for them.  The only drawback is that they are costly.

  1. Spinning Hard Drive

A Hard Disk Drive (HDD) uses spinning magnetic cylinders to store and retrieve data. They are high-capacity, affordable storage devices capable of storing large amounts of data for a reasonable price. It is recommended that these drives only be used in stationary areas because they are prone to mechanical damage. Due to their constantly rotating platters, the hard disk drive is prone to wear and lasts between five and ten years.

  1. RAIDs

You can combine SSDs and HDDs to form Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks (RAID). RAIDs can be compared to a single disk of many smaller ones. It increases performance and capacity and offers redundancy to restore data during disk failure. You can enable RAID on SSDs and HDDs

  1. SSD RAIDs

SSD-based RAID speed is faster, reducing the risk of a second disk failing during rebuilding. The SSD raids can achieve speeds up to 3000 MBps with specific configurations. Since SSD memory drives are not prone to mechanical damage, these RAIDs are highly durable and can handle any type of data, ranging from small to large multimedia files. But these RAIDs are costly to set up and have limited capacity compared to HDD RAIDs.

  1. HDD RAIDS

The HDD RAIDS provides the cheapest method of storing large amounts of data. It helps to reduce the fragility of HDDs to ensure that the systems are stable during disk failures.  Due to disk drives becoming larger without significantly increasing their speeds, rebuilding time has become an issue.

Multi-TB disks can take days to rebuild, requiring RAID solutions like the RAID-6, which features two-party disks for reliability to minimize data loss when two disks fail simultaneously.

Conclusion

The best hard drive for your DAS depends on how much you can afford, but all three choices are effective. But if you’re looking for maximum performance, solid-state drives with high capacities are the best option when you don’t need much storage space. The HDD raid is ideal for reliability and large capacity. For a start, choose drives with more storage capacity than your current drive.