HP SATA drives are designed for the reliability and mass storage demanded by today's entry server and external storage environments. The SATA portfolio is categorized into two categories: Entry (ETY) and Midline (MDL) drives. HP SATA Entry drives are the lowest unit-cost solution for entry-level servers. HP SATA Midline drives are designed with economical reliability and performance for external storage, backups and archival applications. These high capacity drives provide the lowest $/GB to our customers. Both Entry and Midline SATA drives provide the best price advantage for non-mission critical applications with low workloads of 40% or less. HP SATA drives are available small form factor (2.5-inch) and large form factor (3.5-inch) and ship with a standard one year warranty.

Entry SATA drives offer customers the lowest acquisition cost, features include the following:
Reliability for non-mission critical entry server environments, appropriate for <40% workload. Native Command Queuing (NCQ) to increase performance of SATA hard disks by optimizing the order in which received read and write commands are executed. Buffer Error Detection is used to protect the data in the drive buffer via parity or ECC. TLER purposely constrains the drive to report the error as soon as possible within 5 seconds vs. unlimited retries. Ships with a standard one year warranty.

Midline SATA offers customers the lowest $/GB drives and increased features over Entry SATA.
Increased reliability of approximately two times Entry drive reliability based on <40% workload. Detects a specific temperature threshold, drive throttles performance to protect itself. Improved rotational vibration robustness for immunity to environmental rotational affects. Native Command Queuing (NCQ), Buffer Error Detection, Time Limited Error Recovery (TLER), Microcode Download and 3Gb/s compatibilty. Ship with a standard one year warranty.

SATA Applications.
With the attractive low acquisition cost and high capacity points of SATA drives it is important to understand the appropriate applications where SATA drives should be used. Proper usage (IE <40% workload) of these drives will lessen the probability of drive failure. For high IOP's performance intense applications, mission critical applications or extreme environments HP recommends Enterprise Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) hard drives.