Why Dell Branded Hard Drives? A Dell White Paper Dell
Why Dell-Branded Enterprise Hard Drives?
THIS WHITE PAPER IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, AND MAY CONTAIN TYPOGRAPHICAL ERRORS AND TECHNICAL INACCURACIES. THE CONTENT IS PROVIDED AS IS, WITHOUT EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND. © 2010 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction of this material in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of Dell Inc. is strictly forbidden. For more information, contact Dell. Dell, the DELL logo, and the DELL badge, PowerConnect, and PowerVault are trademarks of Dell Inc. Other trademarks and trade names may be used in this document to refer to either the entities claiming the marks and names or their products. Dell Inc. disclaims any proprietary interest in trademarks and trade names other than its own.
December 2010
Why Dell-Branded Enterprise Hard Drives? : Bryan Martin, Dell Product Marketing Manager for HDD & SSD
Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................... 4 Dell Protects You Against Defects ................................................................................. 4 Compatibility ....................................................................................................... 4 Subcomponent Control............................................................................................ 4 Controlled Production ............................................................................................ 4 Dell Quality Tracking And Monitoring ............................................................................. 5 Hard Drive Performance ............................................................................................. 5 First to Market ........................................................................................................ 5 What This Means for You ............................................................................................ 5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 6
December 2010
Why Dell-Branded Enterprise Hard Drives?
Introduction Dell-branded HDDs are more expensive than similar products available from third parties. Why does Dell charge a premium for the Dell-branded version and what benefits does it bring? Dell hard drives are robust, built by premium manufacturing processes and rigorously tested for maximum reliability. We specify and control the manufacture of our hard drives’ firmware and hardware subcomponents to assure compatibility and add additional capability to reduce the costs of maintenance. The net is improved stability and performance; Dell’s hard drive reliability is more than twice as good as the advertised reliability specifications of drive suppliers, offsetting much of the cost premium via improvements in reliability and maintainability.
Dell Protects You against Defects Compatibility Functionality – Dell specifies the operational capabilities of Dell hard drives with the complete storage subsystem in mind. This assures the drives are fully compatible with Dell systems, including unique Dell functionality. Extensive validation ensures that the Dell hard drives deliver a superior level of performance and reliability. Generic hard drives may not meet Dell specifications; thus, their performance and compatibility with Dell systems is uncertain. Firmware Updates – Dell continually monitors new firmware levels available from suppliers. If a new level is relevant, we validate it to see if it meets our requirements for functionality, quality, and performance. Dell firmware can be updated while a drive is actively in use or online, giving the customer more options for introducing critical patches by removing the need to offline the storage. Subcomponent Control Magnetic heads/media –Heads and media are complex components with nanometer-sized features, built by processes similar to those used for the manufacture of semiconductors. Suppliers typically use multiple sources of heads and media in any given drive model. But all sources are not created equal. Dell tests and approves each head/media combination and rejects any with inferior characteristics. Even heads and media from a single source can vary widely in their critical parameters. In such cases, Dell requires components with ‘center cut’ parameter values and leaves those with outlier values for the generic drive manufacturers. Mechanical components – In a similar fashion, Dell tests and controls all motors, bearings and other multisource components. When you purchase a Dell drive, you can rest assured that Dell has controlled and verified the entire bill of materials for the product. With generic drives, components used can change at any time and may not be up to Dell quality. Controlled Production Dell manufacturing process – Hard drives are produced in high volume. Achieving quality requires exacting controls at every stage in the manufacturing process. When a supplier is preparing for initial production of a new hard drive model, Dell engineers perform an audit of the factory to establish Dellspecified processes. Test times and burn-in times are typically longer than for generic drives. After burn-in, Dell requires statistically significant sample testing. Randomly selected drives are tested to assure error-free operation and performance. In addition, we require long-run Ongoing Reliability Testing of the drives for several weeks at elevated temperatures. Data from these tests can detect manufacturing changes that might result in drives with lower reliability than previous production.
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Why Dell-Branded Enterprise Hard Drives? Premium processes like these mean that Dell drives are the cream of the crop, with the best components, the best manufacturing processes, and the most thorough quality monitoring. Drives that exit the manufacturing process without meeting Dell criteria are not Dell branded; typically, they’re loaded with generic firmware and sold through distribution or retail.
Dell Quality Tracking and Monitoring When a system is built in a Dell factory, each hard drive is scanned, and a record is made of the system and its receiving customer. This lets Dell trace drives by manufacturer, model, and production date for quality monitoring within our installed base. By tracking field returns, Dell can automatically detect when a drive make, model or vintage exhibits a failure rate that differs from target. Dell maintains a system of automated triggers that detect even subtle issues. In the unusual case of a drive with a high failure rate, these triggers typically alert Dell to the problem prior to detection by other OEMs, and often even before the supplier is aware of the problem. In such cases, Dell drives for rapid root cause understanding, and corrective action is often available to Dell customers first. Suppliers tell us that Dell field quality tracking is the best in the industry.
Hard Drive Performance Enterprise applications require high performance under a wide range of random access and sequential workloads. Enterprise hard drives have many complex performance features such as caching and command queuing. Dell benchmarks all Enterprise hard drives in the industry and works with suppliers to tune the drive firmware for Dell systems, ensuring maximum system performance is achieved.
First to Market Dell has strong relationships with all suppliers of Enterprise hard drives. Suppliers often make samples of new hard drives available to Dell prior to other system OEMs. Often, Dell has embedded many of our requirements and test plans into the supplier’s product development processes. This means the drives have actually been developed with Dell functionality in mind. An important result of our partnerships is speed to market. Most OEMs commence system qualification when the supplier provides initial samples from mass production. The system qualification process can take several months. Because Dell system testing is part of the supplier’s development process, Dell system testing is largely completed by the time the supplier enters mass production. The result is that industry-leading new drives are usually available from Dell before they are available from any other OEM.
What This Means for You Error-free, compatible operation – Dell protects you from interoperability problems between hard drive and system. Functional compatibility is assured, because we’ve specified the operational characteristics of the hard drive. Performance is maximized because the drive firmware is tuned to Dell adapters and software. Electrical interoperability at speeds of up to 6Gb/sec. is achieved, because we’ve tuned the SAS and SATA interface parameters to match Dell backplanes and adapters. We even specify mechanical performance: Dell drives tolerate a range of both rotational and linear vibration. Performance – Dell hard drives support maximum system performance across a wide range of workloads. Dell drives are optimized for top performance with Dell RAID controllers, HBAs and Dell software.
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Why Dell-Branded Enterprise Hard Drives? High Field Reliability –The benefit of Dell’s compatibility optimizations, vigilant quality monitoring, and ongoing optimization of the supply chain is realized in Dell’s hard drive reliability premium; Dell’s hard drive reliability is more than twice as good as the advertised reliability specifications of drive suppliers. Whether you directly maintain your storage or have a service to do it for you, this decreases the overall costs across the board while safeguarding your data.
Conclusion For data integrity, reliability, and performance, you should insist on Dell-branded hard drives. Dell’s comprehensive quality control and involvement in the hard drive manufacturing process, from detailed design specification to post-purchase quality monitoring, make Dell-branded drives the superior choice for your servers and storage systems.
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