Introducing lower tiers of storage can enable companies to manage their tiers of data more cost-effectively. Storage systems in online, high-transaction environments continue to integrate the highest performing components, ensuring the greatest uptime and reliability, while lower workload environments can use more cost-effective components to accomplish their tasks.

Recently, the highest-capacity drives have been tuned to desktop PC environments, where workloads are much less stringent than in enterprise deployments. Hence, reliability of desktop-class drives in enterprise environments needed attention. In response, HDD vendors are now offering drives that deliver performance, capacity, and a variety of interfaces, without compromising data integrity or reliability.