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SATA in the Enterprise - A 500 GB Drive Roundup

Posted July 13th, 2006 by eugene

The enterprise storage market continues to evolve towards a new paradigm. In the past, high-performance applications were served by arrays of 15,000 RPM drives while 10,000 RPM units continued to serve as workhorse units for less intensive real-time applications.

As always, cost is a key factor that drives change. In addition to the price of drives themselves, expenditures relating to housing, powering, and cooling arrays must also be considered. As a result, the industry is moving to a more segregated approach where high-performance 15,000 RPM units service data where speed of retrieval is of utmost importance while slower yet larger and more cost-effective 7200 RPM drives store the bulk of data where a somewhat more leisurely retrieval does not significantly affect productivity.

Thanks to interoperability afforded by the newer SAS standard, SATA drives have stepped into the spotlight. With the ability to easily integrate into serial SCSI infrastructure, enterprise-class SATA drives have enjoyed increased attention from the big three American drive manufacturers.

Seagate, Maxtor, and Western Digital have all entered the fray with SATA units specifically tuned for the enterprise sector. While leveraged from consumer-class SATA designs, these differentiated models undergo tests under different workloads, often enjoy longer factory burn-in cycles, are rated for longer mean times between failures, and are backed by a more business-oriented 5-year warranty.

Let us take a closer look at three 500-gigabyte units that squarely aim to seize the burgeoning nearline enterprise sector where cost and capacity rather than sheer IOps drive the market.

Top of the drive

Maxtor MaXLine Pro

  • 3.0 Gb/sec with NCQ
  • 125 GB/platter
  • 8.5 millisecond seek time
  • 16-megabyte buffer
  • 15-pin power only
  • 5-year warranty
Maxtor's long-awaited update to the 300 GB MaXLine III, the MaXLine Pro represents an ambitious overhaul over its predecessor... the firm claims that no stone was left unturned when seeking ways to improve upon its older design.
Lowest Real-Time Price:
Top of the drive

Seagate Barracuda NL35.2

  • 3.0 Gb/sec with NCQ
  • 125 GB/platter
  • 8.0 millisecond seek time
  • 16-megabyte buffer
  • 15-pin power only
  • 5-year warranty
The first 500 GB enterprise-oriented offering to the market, the NL35.2 represents an evolutionary upgrade over the original 400 GB NL35.1. Seagate's name remains a gold standard of sorts against which the competition is compared.
Lowest Real-Time Price:
Top of the drive

WD RE2 WD5000YS

  • 3.0 Gb/sec with NCQ
  • 125 GB/platter
  • 8.9 millisecond seek time
  • 16-megabyte buffer
  • 4- & 15-pin power
  • 5-year warranty
A product of the continued consolidation of WD's enterprise offerings, the RE2 WD5000YS bumps up the capacity offered by the preceding WD4000YR by 25%. It is also the first server-aimed design from WD that features the newer, 3 gb/sec transfer rate.
Lowest Real-Time Price:

As always, tests on these three contenders were conducted using StorageReview's Testbed4 suite of measurements. NCQ remained enabled for all tests, though figures comparing performance with NCQ on and off may be found towards the end of the review. Lets turn to the figures!

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