EMC SATA Drives: 3 Mistakes to Avoid

As the demand for data storage space continues to grow, some enterprises are tempted to substitute smaller drives with SATA drives to cut costs and manage more data. This choice is tricky — using EMC SATA disk drives without a complete storage plan can backfire, damage performance, and cost the enterprise even more of their precious budget.
According to a Storage magazine survey, 38% of enterprises surveyed planned to deploy SATA drives in their storage environments this year. If you implement SATA EMC disk drives this year, will you use it correctly?
The next time you implement SATA into your EMC storage array, make sure you pay attention to the list of definite DON’TS:
DON’T #1: Use SATA Drives for High Performance Applications: SATA drives are not designed to handle high performance applications as they spin slower and hold larger amounts of data, which slows down response speed.

Do This Instead: The best drives for high performance applications are either Fibre Channel or, if you can afford it, Solid-State drives. High performance EMC drives, like Fibre Channel and SSD, spin at faster rates and hold less data to improve speed and performance.

DON’T #2: Cut Costs by Swapping for SATA Drives: If you plan to cut costs by substituting SATA drives for several smaller drives at random, well, think twice before making that decision. Swapping larger drives for several smaller drives reduces the amount of spindles in your array, which can negatively impacting your performance levels. So if you swap too many less expensive SATAs for the faster Fibre Channel drives, you could hurt your storage environment performance in the long run.

Do This Instead: A better way of cutting cost is move Tier 2 applications and data to SATA drives. Whether automatically or manually, tiering can help you cut costs by keeping your most critical data and high performance applications on the expensive, faster storage, and storing less critical applications and data on less expensive SATA storage.

DON’T #3: Deploy SATA Drives Without a Storage Strategy: All EMC drives have specific characteristics that make them unique, and these differences should be considered when choosing a drive. Sure, your current budget can buy more SATA drives than any other drive, but the price doesn’t make SATA a good fit for your environment.

Do This Instead: Create an all-inclusive data storage strategy, and indicate which EMC drives can be used in specific locations. Perhaps your less critical information will be allocated to SATA, while your Oracle database will be allocated to faster Fibre Channel drives. Planning before you purchase will help you make the most cost-effective decisions so you can improve your performance of your EMC drives.