Hard Drive Nearline Storage
Some hard drive and storage systems vendors and suppliers use the term in reference to low-rotational speed hard drives, that are built to be more reliable than generic desktop and laptop computer hard drives, and are intended to be operational continuously for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, possibly for several years.
Nearline hard drives may be used in personal or small business Network Attached Storage systems, or as non-critical moderate performance data storage on servers, where greater durability is required for the drive to operate continuously.
By comparison, standard hard drives are assumed to only be in operation for a few hours each day, and are not spinning when the computer is either turned off or in sleep mode. Standard hard drives may also use data caching methods that can improve single-drive performance, but would interfere with the operation of multi-drive RAID storage systems, potentially causing data loss or corruption.
Specifically the term nearline hard drive is being used to refer to high-capacity Serial ATA drives that work with Serial Attached SCSI storage devices. Presumably this usage is by analogy to the high-capacity and low-access speed tape systems.
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