Swarm hard drive type recommendation

Swarm has the ability to spin down its drives when completely idle, which in a production environment may be almost never.  In this case, Swarm can be very hard on consumer grade drives since the health processor is continuously accessing the drives to check the streams.

Consumer grade drives are rated for a duty cycle of around 8 hours per day, whereas enterprise grade drives are rated for continuous use.  Using consumer grade drives in Swarm nodes can (and does!) lead to early and frequent drive failure.   We strongly discourage using consumer-grade hard drives.

Below is a sample of vendor models of SATA disks:
- Seagate: AS = Consumer, ES = Enterprise
- Western Digital: RE, RE2, RE3 = Enterprise
- Hitachi: Deskstar = Consumer, Ultrastar = Enterprise

For more information, see our documentation: Hardware Requirements for Storage → Selecting Hard Drives