The market for enterprise storage has largely been driven by the need for high sustained performance, density, reliability and efficiency at a reasonable price – which is why hard disk drives (HDDs) were the top storage medium for enterprises for a number of years. These enterprises were able to overcome some of the performance and reliability challenges inherent in HDDs by using RAID technology, which was designed with HDDs specifically in mind.
More recently, with the introduction of Gen 4 NVMe SSDs, the performance gap between SSDs and HDDs has become too much to ignore. As enterprise applications started using more real-time data, HDDs could no longer keep up. Using NVMe SSDs solved the performance challenge, but endurance and reliability remained problematic issues.
