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The Hard Drive is the main storage device for your HP workstation. Important factors to consider when deciding on a Hard Disk Drive are the storage capacity (ex. 500GB), the rotational speed (ex. 15K rpm), and the interface (SATA or SAS). Faster rotation speeds generally deliver faster performance.
HP workstations offer SATA (Serial ATA) and SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) hard drive interface choices. SATA generally offers lower costs while SAS offer higher performance especially with multiple disk configurations. SAS disks also generally have a higher MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure). SAS is the natural evolution from the older parallel (SCSI) to a serial interface just as Parallel ATA/IDE drives evolved to Serial ATA (SATA) drives.
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SATA or Serial ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) is the serial counterpart of the PATA or Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment and is capable of higher data transfer rates. The evolved architecture has the advantage of being point-to-point meaning each SATA drive connects to its own interface instead of the master-slave relationship present in parallel ATA interfaces. Available with (150MB/sec. or 300MB/sec.) transfer rates and (7200 rpm or 10,000 rpm) capabilities. Also offered is the SATA/300 NCQ (Native Command Queuing) 7200 rpm or 10,000 rpm. Other advantages of SATA vs. PATA is the connectors for Serial ATA are much smaller resulting in the ability to attach more drives on the motherboard or controller card. Also the cables for the Serial ATA are much smaller providing extra space inside the case.
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SAS (Serial Attach SCSI) is a high performance point-to-point architecture in which all devices connect directly to the storage controller. SAS was developed to solve the technological limitations of the parallel bus architecture. The new point-to-point archetecture delivers the full bandwidth of the bus to each device instead of sharing it between all the devices attached to the bus. SAS hard drives have replaced SCSI hard drives. Available in 300MB/sec transfer rates and 10,000 rpm and 15,000 rpm capabilities.
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Tip:
Purchase the largest hard drives you can afford - you can never have enough drive space. Inevitably, the amount of space you consider sufficient now will be inadequate in less than a year. In most cases, a single hard drive is sufficient; when possible, however, buy a system that has room for additional hard drives so you can upgrade later.
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