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Disk drives and installation
The ES NAS series supports solid-state drives (SSD) and hard disk drives (HDD). The ES NAS natively
supports Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) HDD/SSDs. To use SATA HDDS, users must purchase additional SAS-
to-SATA interposer cards. The ES NAS series supports the following storage configurations:
All-SSD arrays: SSDs are the best choice for I/O-intensive workloads and business-critical storage
solutions. In addition, implementing a read cache across an SSD array is the most common
solution to accommodate increased workloads. The ES NAS supports an SSD read cache to
maintain the required IOPS.
Intermix of SSDs and HDDs: The ES NAS supports all-SSD drives as well as intermix of SSDs and
HDDs for balancing cost and performance requirements for a variety of usage cases such as
virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and web servers.
All-HDD arrays: This configuration offers the best cost/capacity ratio. It is suitable for storing
infrequently-accessed "cold" data. It is also suitable for sequential workloads such as video
editing and surveillance applications.
We recommend implementing an intermix of HDDs and SSDs with cache acceleration. For this type of
configuration, SSDs should be installed in the bottom row of the NAS (bays 1 to 4). The ES NAS will use
HDD1~HDD4 for system configuration and cache and HDD5~HDD16 for data storage. This type of
configuration prevents the interference of the storage pool management with QES system operations.
The disks that are used for data storage can also be easily migrated to another storage system.
