Faceoff at One Terabyte: Seagate's Barracuda ES.2 and WD's Caviar GreenPower
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Leveraging a unique five-platter design, Hitachi Global Storage managed to bring the formidable Deskstar 7K1000 to the market well before competing designs. For several months now, Hitachi's beast has combined the best capacity and performance one could get on the SATA interface. Now, however, competitors Seagate and Western Digital have commenced shipment of their first terabyte units... and each manufacturer's take is a bit different from that of Hitachi's.
The Barracuda ES.2 is the enterprise-grade version of Seagate's consumer-oriented Barracuda 7200.11 and the successor to the firm's 750-gigabyte Barracuda ES 750 (retrospectively the "ES.1"). With the luxury of a later introduction, the ES.2 manages its terabyte capacity utilizing just four 250-gigabyte platters as contrasted to the Deskstar 7K1000's five-disc design. Seagate specs the ES.2's seek time at 8.5 milliseconds. |
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With the ES.2, Seagate joins Hitachi as one of the first manufacturers to offer a 32-megabyte buffer on its drive as an option across the entire family's capacity. The Deskstar 7K1000's enviable performance gains suggest that the time may be ripe for the industry as a whole to move to this new level. ES.2 units featuring a more standard 16-megabyte cache are also available.
The Barracuda ES.2 is also the first enterprise-class SATA design from Seagate that will also be available equipped with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. Slowly but surely SAS is displacing the traditional 68-/80-pin LVD interface with its vastly simplified architecture and its convenient interoperability with the mass-market SATA connection.
Seagate equips the ES.2 with a vibration compensation system typically associated with enterprise drives to mitigate performance problems that arise when many drives are packed into the same chassis and rack. The manufacturer also boasts an MTBF and error recovery rate that rival the best of the SCSI/SAS world (1.2 million hours and 1x10E-15 respectively). Seagate backs the unit with a 5-year warranty.
Also with the ES.2, Seagate commences with a newer focus on environmental concerns. Reducing power draw nets a double-edged savings through both reduced power consumption itself and reduction in dissipated heat and associated cooling costs. Seagate claims the improvements, collectively offered under its "PowerTrim" label, net a 20% reduction in draw when contrasted with the drive's predecessor... and 55% in watts-per-gigabyte when the ES.2's larger capacity is taken into account.