Physical drives and device types

Physical drives (also known as physical disks) are the hard drives and solid-state drives that are mounted in drive enclosures in HPE 3PAR Storage systems. When physical drives are added to a storage system, HPE Storage operating systems automatically divide the physical drives into chunklets.

Physical drives are also characterized by device type.

Fast class (FC). Fibre Channel and SAS drives

Nearline (NL). Enterprise SATA drives

Solid-state drive (SSD). Solid-state disk drives

NVMe SSD drives

HPE Primera 4.2 supports NVMe NAND capacities with up to eight NVMe NAND drives per node pair. SSMC displays the NVMe NAND drives in Physical Drives page and can be identified by looking at the protocol property that displays NVMe. The CPG creation is based on either FC/NL/SSD.

When we create a CPG with device type SSD, NVMe NAND drives are also included in the CPG. Hence, there are no changes in the SSMC UI during CPG creation using these drives.

Learn more: Storage virtualization overview, Chunklets.