White Papers

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) for NAS and Enterprise Storage come in two different flavors of block size. Traditionally, the internal block size of HDDs is 512 byte, with 512 byte also used at the external interface. This technology is called 512 byte native, or 512n. Newer HDD models use an internal block size of 4k byte for higher storage efficiency, but still provide 512 byte at the external interface through a transparent emulation process. This technology is called 512 byte emulated (512e). Additionally drives with the 4k byte internal block format at the interface (4k byte native) are available, but these are rare and exclusively used in specific enterprise applications.

As demand for nearline HDDs for data centers is growing, the requirements for data storage solutions for both cyber and physical spaces are diversifying, making it necessary to develop new innovative technologies for not only reading but also writing data. High-reliability technologies are attracting plenty of attention as a means to overcome the limit to the HDD recording density and thereby solve the information explosion problem.

The growth and prevalence of cloud services has set the stage for the increasing dissemination of different types of storage services for different types of data storage needs.

With the prevalence of IoT, big-data, cloud, and other IT services, the volume of data generated is increasing exponentially.

This paper discusses the various factors that impact upon the reliability of Hard Disk Drives (HDD).

In April 2011 Toshiba announced Wipe2 technology (later mention) Toshiba’s unique set of enhanced features for TCG-Opal selfencrypting disk drive (SED) models.

Enterprise customers are faced with an unprecedented diversity of choice when selecting the storage components and infrastructure for their datacenters and cloud environments.