IT Hardware Insights & Guides

How to identify SCSI and IDE drives by connector and generation, the ID and jumper settings that stop detection, SSD adapter options, and...

What a Dell or HPE drive kit actually includes, when it beats a bare drive, when the bare drive is the better buy, and the one thing kits...

Why storage arrays reject drives that match the specification, the ProLiant to MSA and PowerEdge to PowerVault traps, and how to identify...

The three things that actually differ between NAS, enterprise and desktop drives, why desktop drives fail in arrays, and whether enterpri...

What hot-swap, simple-swap and fixed drives are, why the bay rather than the drive decides it, the IBM and Lenovo simple-swap trap, and h...

Why U.2 and U.3 share a connector but are not interchangeable in both directions, what a tri-mode backplane is, and how to tell which you...

Which drives fit ProLiant Gen9 and Gen10 servers, why the Smart Carrier generation decides it, HPE firmware coding, the MSA trap, and wha...

Which drives fit 14th generation PowerEdge servers, why the carrier differs from R730, per-bay NVMe support, Dell firmware coding and wha...

What 512n, 512e and 4Kn sector formats mean, where 4Kn fails, why mixing formats in a RAID group causes rebuild failures, and which forma...