P47973-001 HPE 480GB SATA 6GBPS Read Intensive 3.5 Inch Smart Carrier Multi Vendor Solid State Drive

The HPE P47973-001 480GB SATA 6Gbps RI 3.5-Inch SSD

The HPE P47973-001 480GB SATA 6Gbps Read Intensive 3.5-inch Smart Carrier Multi Vendor Solid State Drive with Tray is engineered to meet the ongoing demand for reliable, cost-efficient, and scalable storage in enterprise server infrastructures. This drive belongs to a category of HPE server-grade SSDs designed specifically for performance-sensitive workloads that require enhanced read throughput, low latency, efficient energy use, and steady reliability. As organizations continue transitioning from traditional HDDs to faster, more durable SSDs, this drive category has become essential for IT departments seeking improved storage efficiency without unnecessary overhead.

This category typically encompasses several variations of HPE Read Intensive (RI) SSDs that use SATA 6Gbps connectivity and support HPE Smart Carrier trays for seamless integration into ProLiant and other compatible HPE server models. The 3.5-inch form factor with an integrated tray ensures easy hot-plug capability, optimized airflow management, and straightforward physical installation within enterprise server chassis. Within this category, drives are often used for read-heavy tasks such as database indexing, web servers, file servers, content delivery, virtualization storage layers, boot workloads, and large-scale analytics environments where fast random read operations significantly impact application responsiveness.

Read Intensive

Read-intensive SSDs, such as the P47973-001, are tailored to offer high-performance read capabilities at a lower cost per gigabyte compared to mixed-use or write-intensive drives. These drives use enterprise-grade NAND flash memory optimized for longevity under read-focused workloads. While write endurance is lower than in mixed-use SSDs, it remains more than adequate for operating systems, application storage, virtual machine hosting, and large datasets primarily accessed rather than modified.

Benefits of Read-Optimized

Organizations benefit from this storage category by achieving the right combination of speed, endurance, and cost-effectiveness. Read-intensive SSDs reduce latency and improve overall system responsiveness, especially when supporting simultaneous user access or database queries. Moreover, by offloading data-intensive read operations from slower traditional hard drives, systems utilizing these drives can achieve significantly higher performance without requiring the investment needed for write-intensive SSDs.

SATA 6Gbps Connectivity Features

Within this product category, SATA 6Gbps plays a crucial role as a widely adopted storage interface providing a solid balance between speed and affordability. Though SAS SSDs offer higher bandwidth, SATA-based SSDs still remain a practical solution for businesses seeking strong performance without the cost or connectivity limitations of SAS infrastructure. The widespread compatibility of SATA ensures that drives in this category are useful in a broad range of server setups, making them an ideal choice for businesses aiming to extend or upgrade existing environments.

Multi Vendor

The “Multi Vendor” label in this category means that HPE sources the internal SSD hardware from multiple qualified manufacturing partners, ensuring consistent performance, reliability, and adherence to enterprise standards. HPE’s stringent qualification process ensures that even with different underlying manufacturers, the drives meet the same operational and endurance requirements. This provides customers with flexibility and improved supply chain availability while maintaining uniform performance levels.

The HPE SATA Read Intensive SSD

This category of storage drives is built to deliver superior performance compared to traditional enterprise hard drives, especially for applications that rely heavily on rapid access to frequently read data. With a SATA 6Gbps interface and enterprise-grade controller technologies, these drives consistently provide faster data retrieval, reduced latency, and stable throughput under concurrent workloads.

IOPS Performance for Enterprise Environments

Read-intensive SSDs such as the P47973-001 offer significantly improved IOPS performance compared to HDDs. While a typical enterprise HDD may deliver around 150–250 IOPS, drives in this SSD category can achieve tens of thousands of read IOPS. This dramatic improvement enables servers to process more data in parallel, thereby supporting more users and reducing query response times in data-intensive applications.

Power Efficiency

SSD-based storage significantly reduces the power and cooling demands within data centers, contributing to long-term cost savings. The absence of spinning platters and moving heads allows SSDs to operate with lower heat output and higher energy efficiency.

Reduced Failure

Mechanical disks are prone to wear from physical operation, while SSDs in this category rely on flash memory, which is inherently more resilient to shock, vibration, and heat. This contributes to higher MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) values and reduced downtime associated with hardware malfunctions.

Enhanced Data Safety

Through advanced flash memory correction algorithms, firmware integrity checks, and predictable endurance cycles, this category of SSDs helps preserve the integrity of mission-critical data under rigorous operating conditions.

Use Case 

Below is an extensive breakdown of how organizations typically deploy SSDs within this category.

Enterprise Boot Drives

Many businesses use drives like the P47973-001 to host server operating systems due to their fast read speeds and responsive boot performance. This improves maintenance cycles, patch deployments, and system restarts.

Database Acceleration

Read-intensive workloads dominate many database environments, especially when executing queries on large datasets. This category of SSDs provides the necessary speed to enhance database responsiveness.