HPE R3R30A 3.84TB SAS 12G Read Intensive SFF SSD

Overview

The HPE R3R30A is a 3.84TB 2.5-inch Small Form Factor (SFF) SAS 12Gb/s Read Intensive Solid State Drive engineered for HPE MSA Modular Smart Array systems. If your MSA 1060 or MSA 2060 SAN array is running read-heavy workloads — think surveillance video retrieval, VDI boot storms, database read replicas, or high-frequency file serving — this is the drive tier HPE sized for that duty cycle. At 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD) endurance, the R3R30A is not built for write-intensive logging or transactional databases; it is built to deliver maximum read IOPS density per bay at a capacity point that keeps per-TB cost in check.

The drive ships on a Standard MSA Hot-Plug Carrier, so it slides into any 2.5-inch SFF bay in a compatible MSA enclosure without powering down the array. HPE's Digitally Signed Firmware is baked into the drive, verifying at boot that firmware comes from a validated source — a meaningful safeguard in environments where supply chain integrity is a compliance concern. HPE rates these drives against over 3.35 million hours of internal testing and qualification, which translates directly to predictable MTBF behavior in multi-drive array configurations.

Key Features

• 3.84TB Capacity on a 2.5-inch Footprint: Packing 3.84TB into an SFF form factor means you can build dense read-optimized pools in MSA enclosures without sacrificing bay count to larger LFF drives. For a 12-bay SFF shelf, that is up to 46TB raw in a 2U footprint.
• SAS 12Gb/s Interface: The 12Gb/s SAS interface delivers the bandwidth to keep the MSA controller fed during simultaneous multi-stream reads — relevant when multiple hosts are pulling surveillance footage or VDI images concurrently. SAS also provides dual-port connectivity, so a single cable failure does not take the drive offline.
• Read Intensive (RI) Workload Optimization: RI NAND configuration prioritizes read IOPS and read throughput over write endurance. If your workload is 70% reads or higher — which covers most archival, surveillance playback, and content delivery scenarios — this drive tier gives you more capacity per dollar than a Mixed Use (MU) drive without sacrificing the read performance your applications need.
• 1 Drive Write Per Day (DWPD) Endurance Rating: At 1 DWPD, you can write the full 3.84TB once every 24 hours over the warranty period without exceeding the rated endurance envelope. This is the spec to validate against your actual write workload before deploying — applications writing more than 3.84TB/day to this drive are mismatched and will exhaust the NAND prematurely.
• Hot-Plug Standard MSA Carrier: The included hot-plug tray means drive replacement or capacity expansion happens while the array stays online. In a dual-controller MSA configuration, a failed drive can be swapped without a maintenance window — critical for 24/7 surveillance or production storage environments.
• HPE Digitally Signed Firmware: Firmware authenticity is cryptographically verified on every boot. This prevents unauthorized firmware substitution — a known attack vector on storage drives in regulated industries. For HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or government deployments where chain-of-custody matters, this is a spec worth citing to auditors.
• HPE Smart Carrier Self-Describing Icons: The carrier's LED and icon system communicates drive status (healthy, faulted, rebuilding, do-not-remove) without requiring a management console open. The physical