A company is building an online archival system with a low IOPS requirement. Which of the following technologies will meet the IOPS requirement and reduce costs?

SAS SSDs deliver very high IOPS and carry a significantly higher cost per gigabyte, far exceeding what a low-IOPS archival workload requires.

A 5400rpm HDD has a lower rotational speed than 7200rpm or enterprise drives, resulting in reduced IOPS that aligns with the minimal performance demands of archival storage. HDDs at this speed offer the lowest cost per gigabyte among the listed options, directly reducing infrastructure costs. This combination of meeting the low-IOPS floor and minimizing expense makes it the optimal choice for a cost-sensitive archival system.

Fibre Channel is a high-speed storage networking protocol, not a storage medium - it does not itself determine IOPS or storage cost.

Flash memory provides high IOPS performance and a higher cost per gigabyte than mechanical HDDs, making it unnecessarily expensive for low-IOPS archival use.