Lab RAID and Hard Drives - echadbourne/ChadbourneSYS-140 GitHub Wiki

  1. What is the largest capacity single hard drive you can find for sale on the internet(newegg.com or amazon.com are good options)? What is the capacity? How much does it cost?
  • The largest capacity hard drive I can find is 22TB, and there are a few options. The prices range from $500-$627.
  1. What is the largest capacity single SSD you can find for sale on the internet(newegg.com or amazon.com are good options)? What is the capacity? How much does it cost?
  • The largest SSD I can find is 16 TB and it is $3,496. It is sold by Fantom Drives.
  1. Find and compare 2 hard drives of the same capacity from the website newegg.com that have a significant price difference. What may be the reason for this, include one specification to back up your thoughts.
  • Comparing the WD Gold 16 TB Hard Drive ($390) and the Seagate Exos 16TB Hard Drive ($250). The WD Gold is more expensive because it has a larger cache, at 512 MB, while the Seagate Exos only has a 256 MB cache.
  1. Compare an SSD to a Hard Drive. Do a feature-to-feature comparison for at least 2 features other than size.
  • Comparing the WD Red 4 TB internal Hard Drive and the WD Black Internal SSD. The Hard Drive uses a SATA Intereface while the SSD uses something called a PCI-Express 4.0 interface, and the SSD is expressly meant for gaming while the Hard Drive is for NAS systems (there weren't any features for me to compare really. They all listed different things.)
  1. Briefly describe the difference between SAN and NAS. Storage Area Network vs. Network-attached storage.
  • SAN is a type of storage that uses blocks, which split files into smaller bits of storage called blocks which can be formatted with different protocols. NAS is file based and stores whole files in various places.