HPE P23608-B21 16TB 7200RPM SAS 12G LFF LP Business Critical Hard Drive

The HPE P23608-B21 is a 16TB nearline hard drive for ProLiant servers: a 7200 RPM, 12Gb/s SAS, 3.5-inch large form factor (LFF) drive that arrives mounted in HPE's Low Profile (LP) hot-plug carrier. It is helium filled, formatted 512e, supports Instant Secure Erase (ISE) and belongs to HPE's Business Critical class, the name HPE now uses for what it used to call Midline drives. It is a Multi Vendor option, so HPE can supply the drive from more than one qualified manufacturer under this part number.

HPE positions Business Critical drives for high-capacity, high-availability storage such as backup, archive and reference data. For this 16TB model its QuickSpecs lists up to 250 MiB/s of sequential throughput, about 105 random read IOPS at a 128KiB block size, 5.7W at idle and 9.6W under random read/write load. Those numbers describe a bulk storage drive. If the workload is transactional, HPE's 10K Mission Critical SFF drives or SSDs are the better match.

Because the interface is SAS, the drive needs a SAS-capable controller and backplane, such as an HPE Smart Array or MegaRAID controller. It will not run from an onboard SATA-only port. HPE sells a SATA version of this drive in the same carrier as P23449-B21, and a Smart Carrier (SC) version as P23863-B21 for the Gen10 servers that use SC bays in their LFF cages. HPE's carrier matrix lists the LP carrier for the servers shown in the compatibility list on this page.

Before ordering, confirm:

• Your server has an LFF (3.5-inch) drive cage that takes LP carriers, not SFF bays.
• The controller is SAS capable and its firmware supports 16TB, 512e drives.
• Your operating system or hypervisor supports 512e.
• Whether you need the option kit number P23608-B21 or the spare part number P25245-001 for a service replacement.