Why use NVMe drives instead of an ATA interface? Simple answer: because it gives you the throughput of the PCI bus to the drives. And why does that matter? Because the PCI bus is considerably faster than you would get with SAS and SATA.
In this blog post, we’ll walk you through everything you need to know to use NVMe drives in a Dell PowerEdge R640, from ensuring that your server is equipped ...
When it comes to types of server hard drives, there are so many variations out there that it can become challenging to keep track of all the considerations. "Can my server read a 4Kn drive?" "Can I mix SAS and SATA drives in the same machine?" "What about SSDs versus HDDs?"
While we've written extensively on hard drives, we thought it would be helpful to summarize all the types, formats, and ...
A flex bay is a type of modular bay designed for… you guessed it, flexibility! Using a flex bay, you can house different types of storage, such as hard drives (HDDs) or Solid State Disks (SSDs). It's a neat feature to have if you want to be able to easily upgrade your server's capabilities as your own needs grow (without having to go through the hassle of setting up a totally new machine). In...
Enterprise servers are designed to hold multiple hard drives in bays. In fact, most enterprise rack servers have no less than six bays, and the Dell PowerEdge' xd' models can have up to twenty-four drive bays (and that's not including any Flex Bay options!).
In addition to the robust storage options for standard Long Form Factor (LFF) and Small Form Factor (SFF) drives, some servers have alte...
We often are asked by our customers for more details on our refurbished hard drives. “How long have they been running? How many bytes have been written? Are there any bad sectors?” Since we already covered the myths and misconceptions about refurbished hard drives in a previous blog post, we thought it would be helpful to share the objective metrics we use to quantify our drives before we...
On occasion, we get a customer querying us who wishes to buy a SAS drive and wonder if they can install that drive into their personal PC.
We can understand where they are coming from: SAS drives are universally better than their SATA counterparts, both in terms of reliability and transfer speeds. So then, if SAS is better, and it comes in the same 2.5” or 3.5” form factor, why can’t I just...
At TechMikeNY, we are all about capitalizing the value of IT equipment to its maximum. Why throw something out when it has potentially years of production still in it? When you consider the growing issue of e-waste, it’s a no-brainer that both the consumer and the global population benefit from quality refurbished IT equipment.
As you’ll see in this post, nothing fits this bill more than r...
By now, you’ve probably heard of the amazing advantages of SSD drives – the flash-based hard drive technology, which improves performance dramatically over traditional spinning platter drives (or HDDs). You may also have heard of “NVMe,” – which are also SSD drives, but with a specific form factor and interface designed to take advantage of SSD’s lightning-fast read and write capabilities. ...
At TechMikeNY, a big part of what we sell are Enterprise rack servers. A big part of servers is RAID. (If RAID is a new concept to you, read our blog post here, which is a handy primer.) Since so many of our customer questions revolve around RAID configurations and trouble-shooting, we thought it would be a good idea to put down some typical RAID array server Do’s and Don’ts which can serv...
