Solid state drives are fast, wonderful and
sunshine beams from every circuit trace... but when a SSD fails it's
usually an all or nothing proposition. An electrical fault can zap the SSD
controller and if that happens, the data locked inside becomes unrecoverable. It's because
of the technologies' inherently poor tolerance to catastrophic failure that PCSTATS has *not gone* SSD RAID in data critical applications... despite
the very tempting gains in speed to be had.
Instead, we've carefully chosen good quality,
enterprise class mechanical hard drives that offer more economical storage,
increased longevity in write intensive environments and better fault tolerance
in the long run. With all of this in mind, PCSTATS
recently picked up a pair of 1TB Seagate Constellation ES enterprise drives
for a RAID 1 system in a data critical PC. On one hand we
wanted to see how Seagate's enterprise drives would hold up to Western Digital's RE4's - which I've had to RMA about
three times already - and on the other, the Constellation ES drives
are 6Gb/s SATA III drives while the WD RE4 is only 3Gb/s SATA
II.
Anyway, let's take a look at Seagate's 1TB Constellation ES drive and find out how it stacks up against
Western Digital's enterprise disks. Let the hard drive smack down commence!
Seagate Constellation ES hard drive family ranges
in capacity from 500GB to 2TB and is offered in both SATA and SAS variants. Select
models also support SED or FIPS based self-encryption for government mandated
information security compliance. All
Constellation ES drives are rated to 6Gb/s SATA III speeds, incorporate 64MB of cache, utilize 7200RPM spindle speeds and
offer Native Command Queing. The drives are covered by an impressive 5 year warranty and rated to1.2 million
hours MTBF; both of which speak well to their presumed reliability.
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Seagate Constellation ES 1.0TB
Hard Drive |
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Model: Seagate Constellation
ST1000NM0011
Drive Cache:
64MB
Capacity: 1.0TB (7200RPM,
two-platters)
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Type: Hard Disk Drive
(HDD)
Interface: 6Gb/s SATA
III
Price: $109USD
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In this
review PCSTATS will be testing the 1.0TB Seagate Constellation ES ST1000NM0011
hard drive; this model is a 5th generation 3.5" hard drive which supports
6Gb/s SATA III and should be able to meet sustained data transfer rates of
140MB/s.
Seagate's 1TB ST1000NM0011 Constellation ES drive retails for around $109 CDN
($109 USD, £60 GBP) at stores like CanadaComputers.com. Average write latency
is 4.16ms, power consumption just 6.4W. The drive is exceptionally quiet under power (idle: 1.9
bels, seek: 2.7 bels), to the point where we actually
double checked the power cables to see if they were connected! Along with
NCQ, Seagates' ST1000NM0011 supports SMART, write cache, power management, SCT tables and upgradeable
firmware.
Test System Specs
The details of how the 1TB ST1000NM0011 Constellation ES hard drive test system was configured for benchmarking, including the specific hardware, software drivers, operating system and benchmark versions are indicated below. Please take a moment to look over PCSTATS test system configurations before moving on to the individual benchmark results.
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| PCSTATS Test System Configuration |
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