Fibre Channel Hard Drives

Fibre Channel hard drives are the disks used inside older SAN arrays and disk shelves, before SAS displaced FC at the drive level. They remain in demand for one straightforward reason: arrays of this generation are still in service, and a failed drive has to be replaced with the same interface.

What distinguishes an FC drive

• Dual-port — two independent paths to the drive, allowing an array to keep access through a controller or loop failure
• Hot-pluggable — designed to be replaced while the array is running
• 2Gb/s FC — the interface rate on the bulk of the drives we carry
• 10000RPM and 15000RPM — these are enterprise drives, and the capacities are correspondingly modest by modern standards

This is not the same as a Fibre Channel HBA

An FC hard drive is a disk that sits inside an array. A Fibre Channel HBA is the host adapter that connects a server to the SAN fabric. The two are often confused because both are described simply as "fibre channel". If you need the host-side card rather than the disk, see our Fibre Channel HBA page.

Mounting and array compatibility

FC drives were supplied in array-specific carriers, and the carrier is usually the constraint rather than the drive. Array firmware in this generation is also frequently particular about which drive part numbers it will accept into a RAID set — behaviour that varies by array family and firmware revision, so we do not claim universal compatibility.

Tell us the array or shelf model and the part number you are replacing and we will confirm what will work.