Seagate Barracuda ES.2
1 Terabyte SATA Enterprise Level Hard Drive

     The particular hard drives we have before us today are a pair of Serial ATA, 1 Terabyte, Seagate Barracuda ES.2 drives carrying a model number of ST31000340AS. When placing the 1Tb 7200.11 and the 1Tb ES.2 hard drives side by side they look identical, other than the labels. So as far as I can tell, Seagate is using the same shell for both of these drives.

 
The Seagate 1Tb Barracuda 7200.11 (left) and the 1Tb Barracuda ES.2 (right).

Key Features and Benefits

     Obviously, the first key benefit that comes to my mind is having a whopping 1 Terabyte of data storage in a single hard drive. The second benefit I think about is the cost per gigabyte. With this hard drive costing about $350, the cost per gigabyte is only 35 cents. It wasn't all that long ago when a gigabyte of storage was at $100 and just a few short years ago hard drives averaged at about $1 per gig. It's amazing to think about just how far we've come... The next thing that comes to mind is reliability, which is what the "ES" in ES.2 is all about. Enterprise Storage is all about reliable 24/7 operation.

     Another thing I'd like to point out from the technical documents is the unique power management features including PowerTrim. The ES.2 drives have the ability to selectively turn off unneeded functions during a given read/write/random/sequential cycle to save substantial power. RV (rotational vibration protection) maintains performance levels when other drives typically will drop and need to read/re-read data. In a multi-drive cabinets that equates to less vibration as well.

     Here is a list of key benefits: 

• Perpendicular recording technology for maximum capacity
• 24x7 operation and 1.2 M hrs. MTBF
• Dynamic power saving using Seagate PowerTrim™ technology
• Broad spectrum rotational vibration tolerance at 12.5 rads/s2
• Error recovery control - quick error resolution to prevent system timeouts
• Workload management to ensure operational reliability
• Quick and robust download with firmware security checks
• Write Same command for efficient RAID initialization
• Idle Read After Write data integrity checking
• 32-MB cache
• Low total cost of ownership
• 5-year limited warranty

Best-Fit Applications

• Storage-hungry business applications
• Network attached storage (NAS)
• Storage area networks (SAN)
• Maximum capacity servers
• Rich media content storage—audio, video, image
• Reference and compliance data storage
• Enterprise backup and restore—D2D, virtual tape
• Collaboration—email, messaging
• Infrastructure—Web, print, file

Barracuda ES.2 Specifications

* One gigabyte, or GB, equals one billion bytes and one terabyte, or TB, equals one trillion bytes when referring to hard drive capacity.
† Not available through distribution