HPE0-S52 · Question #80
A customer has a Gen10 ProLiant server with SATA 6Gb 7.2k based drives in a Raid 5 configuration. They constantly receive internal complaints about slow performance. When they investigate the…
Option A (Replace HDD with SAS 12Gb drives) is the correct answer. SATA 6Gb/s 7.2k RPM drives are consumer/nearline-grade spindles with limited IOPS, low workload ratings (~55TB/year), and no dual-port redundancy - making them a poor fit for a server under consistent I/O load…
Question
A customer has a Gen10 ProLiant server with SATA 6Gb 7.2k based drives in a Raid 5 configuration. They constantly receive internal complaints about slow performance. When they investigate the server, they are regularly discovering failed drives and write performance response times are near 20ms. Based on this information, what recommendation should you offer to help with the slow performance and failing drives.
Options
- AReplace HDD with SAS 12GB drives
- BReplace the current controller with an E-class based model.
- CInstall MDL disk drives
- DMigrate from Raid 5 to Raid 6.
Explanation
Option A (Replace HDD with SAS 12Gb drives) is the correct answer. SATA 6Gb/s 7.2k RPM drives are consumer/nearline-grade spindles with limited IOPS, low workload ratings (~55TB/year), and no dual-port redundancy - making them a poor fit for a server under consistent I/O load, which explains both the 20ms write latency and the frequent drive failures. SAS 12Gb/s enterprise drives offer higher RPM options (10k/15k), double the bus bandwidth, significantly higher workload ratings (~550TB/year), and are purpose-built for 24/7 server environments.
Why the distractors are wrong:
- B (E-class controller): E-class Smart Array controllers are entry-level - downgrading or swapping to an E-class model would not improve drive reliability or write throughput, and doesn't address the root cause.
- C (MDL drives): Midline (MDL) drives are SATA-based nearline disks optimized for bulk/archive storage, not performance - installing them would likely maintain or worsen the slow performance.
- D (RAID 6): RAID 6 adds a second parity stripe for better fault tolerance but increases write penalty compared to RAID 5, making write performance even worse, not better.
Memory tip: Think "SATA = consumer/slow, SAS = server/fast" - whenever a question mentions failing drives and poor write performance together on SATA hardware, the fix is almost always upgrading to enterprise SAS drives, since they're built for sustained, high-workload server duty cycles.
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