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What are the main differences between desktop-series hard disks and server-series?

The obvious things I can see are: durability (server hardware mostly more qualitative and have more warranty) and power consumption (server hardware more focused on performance, than on power economy). Also server disks are usually a little faster, but it seems, that it is not always the case.

May be there are some other reasons, that make you choose server-oriented series (Seagate ES drives, for example) over desktop-oriented ones (Seagate Barracuda series)? What are they?

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One very important difference is the Time-Limited Error Recovery (aka Command Completion Time Limit)

Time-Limited Error Recovery (TLER) is a name used by Western Digital for a hard drive feature that allows improved error handling in a RAID environment. In some cases, there is a conflict as to whether error handling should be undertaken by the hard drive or by the RAID controller, which leads to drives being marked as unusable and significant performance degradation, when this could otherwise have been avoided. Similar technologies are called Error Recovery Control (ERC), used by competitor Seagate, and Command Completion Time Limit (CCTL), used by Samsung and Hitachi.

This is very important in RAID arrays where one drive can lock up or degrade the array.

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it is a good idea to look for "RAID-compatible" drives, since most consumer drives will never be used this way. – Jeff Atwood♦ Apr 30 '10 at 11:36
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THE most important difference is the level of Vendor Support.

If you don't use "hardware compatible" equipment (i.e. OEM) then you may find yourself SOL when the kit dies and you need to get it fixed quick.

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How vendor can support hard drive other than exchange it on warranty? Do HDDs require any support from vendor after they are purchased? – FractalizeR Apr 30 '10 at 11:27
@fractal not really, but the vendors tend to be jerks about this if they can.. if you put in a "non-authorized" drive they'll refuse to service the machine. – Jeff Atwood♦ Apr 30 '10 at 11:35
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Enterprise hard disks also tend to have a longer MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures), i.e. longer life span, than consumer grade ones.

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up vote 1 down vote

Two things:

  • Cache size
  • Marketing

Reliability is not a distinguishing factor.

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agree, it's 95% marketing. There might be longer warranties if you pay more for the "enterprise" stuff, but economies of scale dictate that the drives will be basically identical. – Jeff Atwood♦ Apr 30 '10 at 11:35
Some desktop models also have 32-64Mb cache size: seagate.com/www/en-us/products/internal-storage – FractalizeR Apr 30 '10 at 11:39
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