Advertisment

Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDDs

author-image
PCQ Bureau
New Update

Seagate has added two new 1 TB drives to its Barracuda fleet of HDDs, namely

the Barracuda 7200.11 and ES.2. These use Perpendicular Magnetic Recording (PMR)

technique on four platters, which results in higher data density than achieved

with traditional Longitudinal Recording technology and hence high-storage

capacity in small form factor, ie 250 GB per disk plate. The ES.2 is meant for

storage-hungry business apps, while the 7200.11 hard drive is targeted at

desktop users. Both drives support SATA II interface, which enables up to 3 Gbit/sec

transfer rate. A high cache memory of 32 MB ensures that the number of accesses

to the drive are reduced, thereby enhancing performance.

Advertisment
Price: Rs 16,500 (Barracuda

ES.2);
Rs 15,500 (Barracuda 7200.11) with warranty of 5 yrs



Meant For: Data centers and NAS admins


Key Specs: 1 TB, 32 MB cache, 7200 rpm


Pros: Massive storage capacity, silent and cooler operation


Cons: None


Contact: Seagate Technology, New Delhi.


Tel: 26286678, 26286679


Email:


amit.rastogi@seagate.com SMS Buy 130185 to 56677






The ES.2 claims to boost reliability with an unrecoverable error rate that is

ten times better than desktop class drives. It is primarily designed to be used

for demanding business and Nearline enterprise storage environments like NAS,

datacenters for disc-to-disc backup, or for archiving solutions, etc. With ES.2,

Seagate has become the first to provide customers with a SAS (Serial attached

SCSI) interface option in addition to SATA. This allows greater flexibility to

both OEMs and end users, as they can use the interface they see most fit.

The 7200.11 with its huge 1 TB storage capacity also makes it ideal for Home

Theatre systems and extreme high-end gaming machines where space is a constraint

but storage capacity demand is always high. The 7200.11 uses Native Command

Queuing (NCQ), which improves disk access speeds by internally optimizing the

order in which received read and write commands will get executed. The drive

also has lower acoustics along with energy efficiency that consumes less power

during disk idle time.

Advertisment

Performance



We tested both drives on an Athlon FX 55 based machine with 512 MB DDR RAM.

As can be seen from the graphs, the Barracuda ES.2 outperformed its cousin, the

7200.11 as well as Hitachi's DeskStar that we reviewed in August this year. Its

performance in Business Disk Winmark was a little lower than DeskStar, but

higher than the 7200.11. The 7200.11 itself gives a higher average transfer rate

than the DeskStar, but performs lower in the other two benchmarks. The ES.2 gave

an access time of 12.8 ms, which was a little higher than the DeskStar's 11.4 ms

(lower is better). The 7200.11gave the highest access time of 13.2 ms. This also

explains why its performance is lower than the other two in both Disk Winmark

tests. The ES.2's scores clearly indicate that it's indeed meant for high-end

apps.

Bottomline: The ES.2 drive is quite befitting for the data transfer

rate-conscious systems like Network Attached Storage systems. While 7200.11 is

ideal for desktop users who do not want two or more drives whirring and humming

in their cabinets.

Advertisment