Storage Drives

M.2 is a solid-state drive (SSD) form factor primarily used as an operating system boot solution. Lenovo ThinkSystem servers support M.2 drives with the addition of a supported M.2 adapter.

The M.2 drives install into an M.2 adapter which in turn is installed in a dedicated slot on the system board of the ThinkSystem server. With two M.2 drives configured, the drives are configured by default as a RAID-1 mirrored pair for redundancy.

There are two M.2 adapters supported:

• Single M.2 Adapter, which supports one M.2 drive; available as the ThinkSystem M.2 Enablement Kit
• Dual M.2 Adapter, which supports one or two M.2 drives; available as the ThinkSystem M.2 with Mirroring Enablement Kit

Introduction

The Intel S4500 Entry SATA solid-state drives (SSDs) for Lenovo servers use Intel 3D NAND TLC Flash Memory technology with a 6Gbps SATA interface to provide an affordable solution with industry leading performance. Compared with the Intel S3520 series, these new drives offer improved performance and lower latency. The S4500 SSDs are optimized for read-intensive applications such as boot, web servers, lower data rate operational databases and analytics.

The 12 Gb SAS HUSMM32 Enterprise Performance FIPS SED solid-state drives (SSDs) are high-performance self-encrypting drives (SEDs) that adhere to the Federal Information Processing Standard 140-2 (FIPS 140-2) cryptographic standard. These drives are available in either 2.5-inch or 3.5-inch drive form factor for System x servers.

Self-encrypting drives provide the ultimate in security for data-at-rest and help reduce IT drive retirement costs in the data center. When combined with the compatible RAID controllers, SED drives in Lenovo servers deliver a cost-effective, secure solution for businesses of all sizes. Self-encrypting drives are also an excellent choice if you need to comply with government or industry rules regarding data privacy and encryption.