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Enterprise form factors

In this section I would like to go through the specifics of enterprise drives and their use in mainstream desktop PCs.

M.2

There are quite a few enterprise drives using the familiar M.2 form factor, mainly in its 110mm long variant. These often have power loss protection and may not be as power efficient as a desktop drive. 80mm enterprise M.2 drives may be problematic in laptops, even if they do fit, as they are often missing the power saving features that a consumer drive would have and thus would likely drain the laptop’s battery more quickly.

U.2 vs U.3

So what’s the difference? They appear the same, but are not quite the same thing. You can pop a U.3 drive on a U.2 connector, but you can’t use a U.2 drive in a U.3 slot. Why? Well, that’s a long story.

The U.2 connector was created with NVMe SSDs in mind. You could fit SATA and SAS drives in the same slot, but they are electronically incompatible. They probably wouldn’t get fried, but they certainly won’t function properly. That’s because a U.2 host connector only has four PCIe lanes routed to it and therefore it can’t work with SATA or SAS drives.

This is where U.3 comes in. The U.3 host connector is universal. That means it can support both NVMe, SAS and SATA drives⁶⁷. This requires support on both the controller and backplane side, and it also means that it uses a slightly different pinout and is capable of detecting the type of the drive that is plugged in.

Most U.3 drives are designed in a way that they will work with both U.2 and U.3 hosts, but due to the different pinout, a U.3 host is not able to communicate with U.2 drives. In practice, a U.2 cable will more than likely work with most U.3 drives as well, just make sure that the drive isn’t shoved away and is receiving enough airflow to keep cool.

SAS drives

Newer SAS drives come with 12Gb/s interfaces and many has dual-port support. That means the drive has two SAS interfaces which can be used in conjunction for redundancy or higher speeds. This latter part is what most are interested in and it requires some special cabling. It is not easy to obtain and there is an entire thread on the topic on STH, so check that out if it’s of any interest to you.

Using the two ports for redundancy often requires backplanes and two host nodes with software support, so it would be quite difficult to achieve with mainstream hardware.

Some novelties

There are a few more drives that I think are worth bringing up, primarily for their uniqueness, as they weren’t always particularly useful or widely adopted.

Sage Microelectronic has supposedly created the first 10TB SSD in Q4 2015⁶⁸. Or rather, they announced one, but I’m unable to find any reviews on any of their drives, suggesting that they were probably never released. However, they did provide some technical details on how they accomplished these high capacities and it appears they used eMMC modules, connected to a (semi-?)custom controller. Their 5TB⁶⁹ drive utilized 40 pieces of 128GB eMMC modules in a striped configuration, connected to this controller, which in turn provided a SATA interface to connect it to a PC.

This was supposedly an SSD, but in reality, it was a just bunch of eMMC drives glued together without any form of PLP and it also lacked any sort of redundancy, aside from what little the eMMC modules may have had built-in. At least they were supposedly using MLC flash internally, but even then, under no circumstances would I classify this as an enterprise-grade drive.

MemoryPack sells a MicroSD to SATA SSD RAID adapter, named the MPK10TF25SSD, which seems to be using a Sage-branded controller, potentially the same as the one used by drive above, which is another interesting, although not particularly useful way of using it. However, as eMMC uses the same interface as SD cards, they are interchangeable. There is another, generic variant of this adapter witht he same controller, which has microSD sockets on one side, and solder pads for eMMC packages on the other.

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