Server Hard Drive Validation Test Report

Intel® Server Boards/Systems 3000 and 5000 Series Chipsets Overview
Revision 23.0
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often have advanced power management. These modes reduce power consumption
along with server cooling requirements, both of which equate to lower operational
costs and less thermal impact on surrounding system components. Enterprise drives
with error recovery control have the ability to quickly respond with data or return an
error to the host controller. With a quick response the RAID set is preserved through
rebuilding of requested data. Full RAID set rebuilds are executed for true drive
failures. To lower costs on desktop drives, error recovery is not a common feature. A
desktop drive in a similar situation would respond too slow to preserve the RAID and
the drive is flagged for replacement. The RAID set would operate in a slower
degraded mode until the drive was replaced. Complete loss of data is possible if
another drive times out during the degraded mode. With higher MTBF and error
recovery, enterprise level drives offer greater reliability than desktop drives in the
server environment.
Hard drives last longer when used in the application for which they were designed. Desktop
drives often lack workload management to lower thermal stresses; have a lower tolerance for
the normal rotational vibration found in a server environment; are not designed to run twenty
four hours a day, seven days a week; and may fail prematurely when installed in a server. To
get the best performance and avoid drive failures Intel recommends using enterprise drives for
server applications.