Seagate Barracuda 1TB HDDs

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.

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.

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.