In June 2007, Seagate Company has released new 7200.11 drive together with Barracuda ES.2. As usually, new drives were not available on our market straight-off, only on the 26.9.2007 first arrival came, and I got few of 500 GB pieces. In today's review I would like to share my opinion on new tested drives. Differences between IDE mode and AHCI mode were tested. I was also curious what ICH8R and Intel(r) Matrix Storage Technology are able to do with RAID setup.



Introduction:

Only recently, the HITACHI Deskstar 7K1000 was voted the number one among drives with up to 1TB of capacity. On the other hand Seagate Company was able to create drive with 1 TB of capacity, using only four platters and second-generation perpendicular recording technology. Another exceptional feature of new Seagate product is speed performance at 105 MB/s sustained data rate. Big 32 MB Cache and fast 3 Gb/s SATA NCQ interface are already obvious. Desktop Barracuda 7200.11 are available with capacities of 500 GB and 750 GB, with 16 MB or 32 MB Cache. The 1 TB model comes with 32 MB Cache. Enterprise equivalents of Desktop Barracuda 7200.11 are Barracuda ES.2, accessible with capacities of 500 GB, 750 GB and 1TB with 16 MB Cache and fast SAS interface (Serial Attached SCSI), or with capacities of 250 GB with 16 MB Cache; 500 GB, 750 GB and 1 TB with 16 MB Cache or 32 MB Cache.

Barracuda 7200.11

Key Features and Benefits:
• Up to 1 TB of storage capacity (also 500 GB and 750 GB)
• Industry’s most reliable hard drive with proven second-generation Seagate® perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR) technology
• Leverages best combination of technology (areal density, PMR) and proven components for volume shipping
• Industry-leading acoustics and power consumption levels
• 5-year limited warranty
• 105-MB/s sustained data rate
• 32-MB Cache


Key Applications:
• Workstations
• Desktop RAID
• Gamer PCs
• High-end PCs
• Mainstream PCs
• USB/FireWire/eSATA personal external storage


Specifications:



You can find more detailed specification of each individual model in the Data Sheet.

Barracuda ES.2

Key Features and Benefits:
• Specifically designed for Tier 2 nearline applications, with one terabyte of second-generation perpendicular recording available on a single, four-platter drive
• The industry’s highest-reliability 7200-RPM drive, designed for 24x7 operation
• Seagate® PowerTrim™ technology dynamically optimizes power consumption by improving GB/watt by 55 percent over prior generation of Barracuda ES drives.
• Best-in-class rotational vibration tolerance provides unrivalled performance in high spindle-density systems.
• Full internal IOEDC/IOECC (Input/output error detection code; input/output error correction code) data integrity protection
• Available with SATA or SAS interfaces
• Dual-ported, multi-initiator SAS provides 100 percent full-duplex compatibility with any SAS mission-critical host in single-system or clustered applications.


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


Specifications:



You can find more detailed specification of each individual model in the Data Sheet

ST3500320AS vs. ST3500320NS

Well, let's say Seagate is little bit disorganised. I'll explain step-by-step. I made an order from K+V Servis for 3 x ST3500320NS, what were supposed to be Barracuda-s ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 500-GB with 32-MB Cache. I was rather surprised that hard drives don't come in special antistatic casing, but are packed in simple transparent plastic boxes. Second surprise came, when I turned HDD, where I've expected to be PCB with a control chip, memory and gear set. But in this case PCB is turned in similar way as Western Digital HDDs (I guess Western Digital took out a patent). When I connected HDD to my PC, here came the biggest surprise. After configuration of RAID 0 in Intel(r) Matrix Storage Console, I could see HDD in details. One of HDD wasn't ST3500320NS, but ST3500320AS. First I thought, restarting of a system might help me with this little problem (just like Roy is advising in IT Crowd), but in BIOS, there it still was. One of HDDs was reporting to be AS. I again checked each of HDDs, they looked all identically on the first sight. There was the same product number on labels, but one of them seemed to be AS. Only after series of test (based on results of tests made on similar HDDs of previous generation), I really proved that it was, slightly faster AS - Barracuda 7200.11. Then I wrote to KikoKK, and he brought me new disk from BGS-Distribution. And again the same problem. Hard drives labelled as ST3500320NS were in fact from a ST3500320AS series. I called KikoKK again, this time he brought me 27 HDDs from Asbis, to be tested. In this moment it was already quite clear that HDDs specified for Slovak market were incorrectly assigned. I found out that 4 of 10 HDDs from BGS, 1 of 30 from ASBIS and 1 of 5 HDDs from K+V Servis were wrongly signed. Finally I got my "NS" drive to finish my test. Thanks to this little confusion, I was able to test also 7200.11 model. And here are the results.











In case of using of the drive with older motherboard, there is a little jumper installed by the manufacturer on HDD, which enables to limit transfer data rate of SATA interface up to 1.5 Gb/s. While using fast 3.0 GB/s SATA, it is convenient to eliminate the jumper.