HPE P20256-001 1.2TB 10K RPM SAS-12GBPS SFF HDD

HPE StoreServ 8000 1.2TB Hard Drive Overview

The HPE StoreServ 8000 P20256-001 1.2TB 10K RPM 2.5in SAS-6Gbps 3PAR Hard Drive is engineered for high-performance enterprise storage infrastructures, providing exceptional speed and dependability for mission-critical workloads. This drive is specifically designed to operate within HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 series storage arrays, offering seamless integration, consistent throughput, and balanced input/output performance for both transactional and analytical workloads. Its 10K RPM spindle speed enhances read/write operations, while the SAS 12GBPS interface ensures reliable and fast data transfers in enterprise data centers.

High-Speed 10K RPM Drive Architecture

Designed to meet the demands of modern storage environments, this hard drive leverages a 10,000 revolutions per minute spindle speed, which greatly improves access times and reduces latency for critical applications. The high rotational speed ensures minimal delays when handling large amounts of random read and write requests. This is particularly advantageous for environments where application performance and transaction processing speed are crucial, such as databases, virtualization platforms, and online transaction processing systems. The 10K RPM architecture strikes a balance between high capacity and optimal performance, enabling organizations to achieve consistent workload responsiveness without compromising storage density.

Optimized for Mixed Workloads

The drive is purpose-built for mixed workload environments, combining strong sequential throughput with rapid random access capabilities. This makes it ideal for use in enterprise scenarios where storage systems are subjected to diverse workloads, including virtual machine hosting, business analytics, and content management systems. The balanced design ensures that read-intensive and write-intensive operations can run simultaneously without causing performance bottlenecks, allowing IT teams to consolidate various applications on the same storage platform while maintaining predictable performance levels.

Consistent Response Under Heavy Loads

Under heavy data center workloads, maintaining consistent response times is essential for uninterrupted business operations. The HPE StoreServ 8000 P20256-001 1.2TB drive employs advanced firmware algorithms to balance cache usage, rotational speed, and queue depth handling. These features work together to deliver predictable I/O performance, even during peak traffic. This consistency helps organizations meet service-level agreements and maintain customer satisfaction, especially in mission-critical environments where downtime or slow response can have significant financial implications.

Advanced SAS 12GBPS Interface Technology

This 3PAR drive incorporates a 6Gbps Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface, a proven enterprise-grade protocol designed to deliver fast and reliable data transfer. The SAS interface ensures superior data integrity, robust error correction, and dual-port capabilities that allow redundant data paths. These dual ports enable multipathing, allowing continuous access to data even if one path fails, which enhances storage availability in clustered environments. The high-speed SAS connectivity also reduces latency and supports full-duplex communication, allowing simultaneous data sending and receiving to maximize storage throughput.

Enterprise-Grade Reliability Features

SAS drives like the P20256-001 are engineered for nonstop data center operations, incorporating end-to-end data protection features and enhanced error recovery algorithms. These features protect against data corruption, bit errors, and unexpected power loss, ensuring data integrity during transfer. Additionally, the robust construction of the drive allows it to withstand the thermal and mechanical stress of continuous operation, delivering a long operational lifespan even in demanding environments. Enterprise-class reliability reduces the risk of unplanned downtime, which is critical for organizations operating large-scale business systems.

Support for Dual-Port Redundancy

The dual-port SAS configuration allows this drive to be simultaneously connected to two separate controllers within the storage array. This setup provides path redundancy, meaning that if one controller or connection path fails, the other path takes over automatically without interrupting data access. Such fault-tolerant architecture is essential in enterprise storage where high availability is non-negotiable. The ability to maintain continuous access ensures data availability and protects against service disruption in clustered or high-availability architectures.

Data Integrity Protection Mechanisms

To safeguard enterprise workloads, the drive includes mechanisms like cyclic redundancy check (CRC) for data verification and advanced error correction codes. These technologies detect and correct potential data transmission errors before they reach the operating system or application, reducing the likelihood of corrupted files. This ensures accurate data delivery, which is essential for enterprise workloads such as databases, ERP systems, and virtual infrastructures where even minor data corruption could cause major operational disruptions.

Integration with HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 Systems

The P20256-001 hard drive is certified for use with HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 series arrays, which are known for their high scalability and performance efficiency. Tight integration with the 3PAR architecture allows the drive to fully leverage 3PAR features such as thin provisioning, wide striping, adaptive optimization, and data deduplication. This synergy ensures that the drive not only contributes raw storage capacity but also enhances the overall performance, efficiency, and resilience of the storage infrastructure. The seamless compatibility simplifies deployment and reduces operational complexity for IT teams.

Enhanced Storage Pool Efficiency

When integrated into HPE 3PAR StoreServ 8000 arrays, this drive participates in wide striping technology, which spreads data across all available drives in the storage pool. Wide striping maximizes parallelism, allowing multiple drives to handle different parts of the same workload simultaneously. This boosts overall array performance and reduces the likelihood of bottlenecks that could slow down applications. Additionally, thin provisioning features in 3PAR systems allow the drive to contribute to efficient space utilization, allocating storage only when data is actually written, thereby optimizing capacity use.

Support for Adaptive Optimization

The drive works seamlessly with the 3PAR adaptive optimization feature, which automatically relocates data between different storage tiers based on usage patterns. Frequently accessed data can be promoted to faster drives, while infrequently accessed data can be moved to slower tiers. This dynamic data placement ensures optimal use of storage resources and improves application performance while reducing total cost of ownership. By being part of such an intelligent tiered-storage framework, the P20256-001 drive contributes to maximizing storage ROI.

Compatibility and Easy Maintenance

The drive is hot-swappable within HPE 3PAR StoreServ systems, allowing administrators to replace or add drives without shutting down the array or disrupting services. This hot-swap capability ensures that storage systems can be maintained or upgraded without affecting production workloads. Additionally, the drive's compatibility with 3PAR's monitoring and management tools allows IT teams to easily track performance metrics, health status, and predictive failure alerts, enabling proactive maintenance and minimizing unplanned downtime.

Enterprise-Grade Storage Capacity and Form Factor

The P20256-001 offers a storage capacity of 1.2TB, providing ample space for demanding enterprise applications while maintaining a compact 2.5-inch small form factor (SFF). The SFF design allows data centers to achieve higher storage density within the same rack space, which is essential as organizations strive to maximize efficiency and reduce footprint in their IT environments. High storage density translates into lower power consumption and cooling costs per terabyte, further improving data center operational efficiency.

Efficient Use of Rack Space

The 2.5-inch form factor enables the deployment of more drives per chassis compared to larger 3.5-inch drives. This allows organizations to scale storage capacity without expanding the physical footprint of their storage arrays. Such space efficiency is particularly valuable in modern data centers where rack space is at a premium. Consolidating more storage into fewer racks reduces overall infrastructure costs, including power distribution, cooling, and cabling requirements, while still maintaining enterprise-grade performance.

Balanced Capacity and Performance

While solid-state drives are popular for high-performance workloads, 10K RPM SAS drives like the P20256-001 strike a balance between performance and capacity at a lower cost per gigabyte. This balance makes them an attractive choice for businesses that require fast data access without the higher costs associated with SSDs. By offering substantial storage space and reliable speed, the drive supports a wide range of applications such as email servers, business intelligence workloads, and departmental databases.

Scalable Storage Infrastructure

Because of its modular form factor and compatibility with 3PAR StoreServ systems, this drive allows for linear scalability. Organizations can start with a few drives and incrementally expand storage as data growth demands, without performance degradation. This scalability aligns with the evolving needs of modern enterprises, ensuring that storage capacity can be increased on demand without disrupting existing services or requiring major infrastructure overhauls.