Great reliability . Good storage . Quick to install
Disadvantages:
Power hungry
Recommend to potential buyers:
yes
Full review
When you need large disk capacity, bulletproof performance and reliability in your servers, you cant really go wrong with the Hewlett Packard Ultra320 146.bGb Scsi hard drives.
When you are running RAID5 on a server and need lots of disks to add to the array, these meaty old disk are a surefire winner every time. Whats more they are in the standard 3.5 inch size and can fit in almost all server applications that require Ultra320 disks.
We have a mixture of G4 and G5 Hewlett packard servers here at work and these drives suit the G4 style servers. The have an easy access and hot swap caddy to contain them which makes swapping the drives much easier should you need to as well as the initial install.
Installation. You cannot get simpler. Open the box. Slide the Hard drive into the allocated bay in your server until you feel the connections click into position. Push the hot swap lever closed on the fron to lock the drive into the array. Done!
Storage capacity. Huge! Depending how you add it to your array and how you partition your drives, they can hold up to 146.8Gb worth of data. Thats 2 to 4 times more than a standard PC disk.
Access speeds. Fast! Rather than your 7500RPM standard computer hard drive, these things spin at 10,000RPM! much quicker! With the extra disk speed you do not lose any loss in performance and reading the data back as well as writing it is ultra fast. The extra speed does come with a few side effects. Firstly they are quite power hungry these devices and running 6 of them in 1 server as we do puts a big load on the power supply. When running a few of these servers on a back up battery, you do notice the drain of power with these disks. Secondly they push out quite a bit of heat. SCSI is reknowned for lots of heat and lots of noise but to be honest they are fairly quiet when in operation. Possibly drowned out by the massive cooling fans that they require!
Reliability. Bullet proof is how i describe them. Obviously they are suited to our environment and they are not being worked too hard but they are on 24/7 and have so far been outstanding. I have 24 of these disks buzzing away inside the servers and they range from 2 months to 3 years old. None have ever failed and I have never needed the \"hot spare\" to kick in and take over when i lose a disk. Great!
Price. Hmmm.....Makes you cry a bit when the disks are £350 each. Yes you can buy cheaper and yes the disks are 10 times the price of PC hard drives but thats what you get when you purchase peace of mind and reliability.
Overall, a fantastic product if expensive and power hungry.
rigorously tested, HP-qualified, SMART capable, Ultra320 Hard Drives offering data integrity and availability in hot pluggable models. - HP HDD Qualification process...
