This is a 500GB, 7200 RPM, 2.5 inch hard disk from the Constellation line of
disks from Seagate. It is ideal for enterprises and has features for business
critical storage systems. The drive can be used in nearline environments as it
offers enterprise-class reliability for 24x7 operations.
And being a 2.5 inch drive it is best suited for space constrained data
centers. The drive also features rotational vibration tolerance that helps to
maintain drive performance even in high-vibration environments (like in a data
center). For business critical applications, the drive failure could be a
potential threat: Seagate Constellation drive has a targeted 1.2 million hours
Mean Time Between Failure rating that ensures robust performance.
The drive also boasts of being energy efficient as it uses PowerChoice
technology that results in lower power consumption during slow or idle periods.
We tested the drive on a Intel Quad Core based machine with 2GB RAM, the same
setup was used for reviewing Hitachi E7K1000 1TB drive (reviewed in Feb'09)
which was also an enterprise class drive.
The Constellation drive gave an average transfer rate of 72.4 MB/sec in HD
Tune benchmark with an access time of 13.7 ms, whereas Hitachi E7K1000 clocked
96.9 MB/sec average transfer rate. The Constellation drive being energy
efficient consumes just 2.9W of power at idle mode while Hitachi E7K1000 drive
consumed 5.2W of power in the same mode. With a smaller form factor and low
power profile, this drive can be used in blade servers as well, besides being
used as high-density nearline storage solution for apps like backup and restore,
video surveillance, medical imaging, etc.
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Bottomline: Considering its small form factor, performance and power
efficiency, this drive is ideal for green data centers.