Added additional details on some of the ES's RAID-specific features. Our overall conclusions remain unchanged, though.

soooo...wut yur sayin is dat the cuda has the same qualities of a cheetah? I doubt any corporation will be willing to bet their data and existence on that. Although, this setup is perfect for a 10 employee company.

Two errors on front page:

The Barracuda ES's owes its - remove 's from ES's

an attribute whose appeal is extends beyond - remove "is"

Nice review, Diss.

I figured that the performance would be close to the same as the desktop model.

Since we are taking enterprise here, I am a bit surprised we did not see some RAID array testing with a quality controller. (RAID 5 would be nice to see)

Of course, I do know that you would then need 4 drives of each make, which is expensive to get and time consuming to setup.

Still, it would be interesting to see how these drives perform in the type of environment they appear to be marketed for, against some of the other drives you tested.

Also, I have a issue with this sentence.

“The company's enthusiasm for longer desktop drive warranties has just blunted what could have been another selling point for the ES.”

Maybe it is just me, but I rather see Seagate get kudos for bringing their desktop drives up to 5 year warranties, rather then the above statement, which gives the appearance of being a knock against Seagate.

I’ll admit to being a huge Seagate fan, and have purchased 4 of their drives just last month.

aw crap

i wonder whos' gonna be the first to launch a tera drive?

consider the storage capacity of a four-drive 1U rack server running RAID 5. With 300GB SCSI drives, you won't even break one terabyte.

So... a four-drive 1U rackmount has only three drives?

I allways thought "Enterprise" class drives were intended for multi-drive setups (some form of RAID array). Now I understand the problems with performing your review that way, as has also been noted by Dposcorp. Still I feel you did an excellent job. Of course some of that opinion is biased by my personal preference for Seagate drives. ;) (In particular I'm personally trying to acquire more 7200.10s immediately.)

Oh and in reply to #1 - RAID 5 uses what's called "rotating parity". This means that the capacity of one drive is distributed in a staggered stripe across all of the drives, which allows this type of array to rebuild itself if one of the drives should fail. At least that's how I understand it! (I've been wrong in the past...)

1, The 4th drive is a hot spare. We have a SCSI RAID 5 setup at our office that is configured this way.

Just a minor criticism on the article. On page 11, could you possibly re-scale those charts, such that we can see a better picture of the results?

For example: The first graph on that page, would it be possible to re-scale such that the max is 1%

Granted, it doesn't matter all that much, but it provides a consistant look with the rest of the article. (Instead of a clump of lines at the bottom of each chart).

Other than that minor issue, the article is good.

I wonder if its possible to come up with a future test to really gauge the reliability of HDDs. :-)