Disk speeds are usually measured in; Rotational speed in revolutions per minute (lowest at 4200rpm, then 5400, 7200, 10k and 15k – this isn’t applicable to SSDs or flash memory). Interface speed is the fastest a disks electronics can try to send the data to the disk controller (these range from ATA’s 100MBps through SATA’s … Read more
One very important difference is the Time-Limited Error Recovery (aka Command Completion Time Limit) Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) is a name used by Western Digital for a hard drive feature that allows improved error handling in a RAID environment. In some cases, there is a conflict as to whether error handling should be undertaken by … Read more
A great reason to change it is if you want to add another task to your list of things to do while increasing the chances of something going wrong. All joking aside, there really isn’t any reason I’ve heard of to change the drive ahead of time. If you have RAID in place, you already … Read more
I don’t think so, not at this time. They’re expensive, it’s a relatively new technology that’s not without its own problems; Jeff Atwood has an interesting blog post about the advantages and disadvantages of using them. Given your intended use case the need for an SSD seems even smaller. You normally see huge benefits when … Read more
The speed degradation is to be expected as the number of files being accessed simultaneously increases. Hard disk drives do not like to be accessed in parallel: every time the read/write head needs to switch cylinders you lose several milliseconds. Even if two files are on the same cylinder, or even the same track, you … Read more
SATA2 disks should be compatible with the Smart Array P400i that comes with your server (or any other SAS controller, for the matter), although probably not with stellar performance as others have noted. But keep in mind that not all SATA disks are suitable for use with RAID because of the infamous Time-Limited Error Recovery … Read more
Hopefully you’ve long since replaced the drive, but since no one has yet directly answered the question… You ran two tests, both of which failed to read the same logical sector of the disk, as indicated by Completed: read failure and the same LBA in both tests. This does indeed indicate the disk has a … Read more
A/C motors in many parts of the world commonly rotate at 3600 RPM because that’s 60 Hz. 7200 rpm is obviously twice that, and 5400 rpm 1.5x. I don’t know the real reason, since HDD motors aren’t driven from A/C, but it’s likely IMHO that it’s related to that. Like used to be possible with … Read more
You can plug in that many drives via USB . . . but I wouldn’t recommend it. The single biggest issue you’re going to run into is the use of USB 2.0 (480Mb/sec shared across all devices on the controller). Unless you’re using USB 3.0, you are going to seriously limit your disk throughput. USB … Read more
The term for this type of disk is a slimline 20mm disk. The OEM for the HP drive you’ve mentioned is the Seagate ST3250318AS The Microserver uses it’s own special drive trays/carriers. You can use any 3.5″ disk in the enclosure, though. Here’s a list of community-submitted compatible drives.