A server technician is replacing the hard drive in a server. After testing, the technician determines the current hard drive failed due to vibration from the machinery near the server. The…

Solid-state drives use NAND flash memory with no mechanical components, eliminating any susceptibility to vibration that causes head crashes or platter damage in spinning drives. Since the failure cause was vibration from nearby machinery, an SSD directly removes that failure mode and best satisfies the reliability goal, even though the capacity is smaller.

A 7200rpm SCSI drive still uses spinning platters and a mechanical read/write head, leaving it equally vulnerable to vibration-induced failure.

A hybrid SATA drive contains a spinning platter component in addition to flash cache, so it retains the mechanical vulnerability to vibration.

A 15000rpm SAS drive spins faster than a 7200rpm drive, making it even more sensitive to vibration and increasing the risk of mechanical failure.