It appears the hard drive manufacturers may be jumping directly to the 2TB enterprise class drives, thereby skipping the 1.5TB drives altogether.
Hard Drive manufacturers have a tendency to release a hard drive's specifications and market them shortly before the drive is actually available for purchase from distributors or resellers. For those customers who need the extra drive capacity urgently, patience is advised. But why should a customer wait to purchase when they so desperately need the capacity?
Initially manufacturers have a limited supply for a new model of hard drive. The reasons for this are varied. From CORAID's experience it can take from two to three months before drive quantities are available for SAN type purchases. New hard drives in the market are more likely to have firmware issues. Therefore, the risk of getting a brand new hard drive with the first version of firmware is considered high risk from a SAN perspective. However, once problems are identified, the hard drive manufacturers are normally very quick to make fixes and provide firmware upgrades to customers.
At CORAID we want to ensure all of our EtherDrive products using any of our certified drives meet our strict requirements of SAN performance & reliability. Our supplier(s) do their own tests on new hard drives. Afterwards CORAID receives several hard drive samples where the drives go through rigorous testing. Next, attention to the hard drive firmware is scrutinized in the CORAID test lab and we constantly scan the web for any reports of firmware issues. Once CORAID determines the hard drive firmware is stable and the drive is able to pass our testing, we then add the hard drive to the disk compatibility table.
Ultimately, this means a customer needs to wait because firmware needs to be stable, drives need to be tested and certified, and quantities must be available from the manufacturer. As always, please ONLY use enterprise class hard drives for any SAN, not desktop class. If you would like to be notified when new 2TB (or other size drives) hard drives are added to the CORAID Disk Compatibility Table, please contact sales@coraid.com.
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