Hitachi hard drives... what is enterprise?

[StephenCampbell]

I'm looking at 1TB internal Hitachi hard drives on OWC for my Mac Pro, and they have two of them. One is normally $89.99, currently $57.99, and the Enterprise one is normally $149.99, currently $52.99.

I looked at the specs, and it looks like some minute things are better about the one, and some about the other. For example, the Enterprise uses more wattage while running, but it's non-correctible read errors are only 1 in 10^15, as opposed to 1 in 10^14 for the non-enterprise drive.

What does enterprise mean? And which one should I get as a normal computer user?

 

[milbournosphere]

Generally, Enterprise == for business.

I'd worry less about the non-correctable errors for the two drives and look more at the difference in seek/read/write speeds. I suspect the enterprise drive uses more power for a reason. If those stats are a wash, I'd probably go with the cheaper of the two drives.

 

[FluJunkie]

Generally, 'Enterprise' drives are designed for speed and reliability, and intended to be used in tasks where they're up and spinning most, if not all of the time. The kind of drives you'd put in servers. Generally, said applications are less sensitive to energy usage and slightly higher costs.

If both will work with your machine, just go with the cheaper one.

 

[cube]

If they are similar, and they cost about the same, go enterprise.

 

[StephenCampbell]

The enterprise uses slightly more wattage, and makes more noise. I don't know, this is a tough call. I've never had an enterprise drive before so I don't know if I'll be able to notice those differences, or if they'll bother me.

I think I'll go with the regular one. Thanks for the info!

 

[nanofrog]

The enterprise uses slightly more wattage, and makes more noise. I don't know, this is a tough call. I've never had an enterprise drive before so I don't know if I'll be able to notice those differences, or if they'll bother me.

I think I'll go with the regular one. Thanks for the info!

The enterprise units are built for improved durability.

Now how they do this, is by using better platters (in most cases, not all, as WD for example, uses platters rated for 1E15 on their consumer disks), and additional sensors (reduce the chance that the heads will physically impact the platters - important in high vibration environments such as RAID).

There's also a difference in the drive's firmware that makes them stable on hardware RAID controllers.

In terms of heat and noise, they won't really make any difference between them from the same maker (mechanical components are the same).

So as stated before, let the cost be your guide. If the enterprise variants are very close in cost to the consumer versions, I'd go with the enterprise models due to the bit error rate on the platters (higher reliability).

Usually however, the enterprise units are quite a bit more, which precludes them from consumer use (they work fine however, so there's nothing to be concerned about here).

 

[JavaTheHut]

3 year warranty onthe Deskstar and 5 year warranty on E7K1000

Hmmm go 5 year warranty man

 

[StephenCampbell]

At this point I would have chosen the enterprise, but unfortunately my order is already "locked," or whatever. Too bad.

I'm upgrading a four year old, 500GB Maxtor drive with 16MB cache, so I'm not too upset with not getting the enterprise. What I've ordered will still be a great upgrade.