Seagate Barracuda ES.2

Seagate may be a Johnny-come-late to the party but have shown how a little patience and engineering can pay off in huge performance dividends. The Barracuda ES.2 – bottom line – is the fastest 1Terrabyte drive out right now and will surely not disappoint business owners or power users whom demand the utmost in storage. It has the reputation and warranty of Seagate (5 years) with performance in spades to back it up.

The Barracuda ES.2 SAS is not what one would consider a consumer level product and very likely won’t be a big seller in the end-user/enthusiast space. However, it should fill a long-empty hole in the workstation and storage markets, allowing true high-capacity storage at fairly low price points with SAS connectivity. It’s unlikely that there will be competition in this arena for quite some time, so if you need lots of SAS-enabled storage capacity, this is just about the only drive to consider right now. However, we would recommend perhaps waiting for an updated version of the drive as firmware revisions will likely smooth things out a bit for the platform. Beyond some slight performance variances and anomalies, the Barracuda ES2 1TB SAS drive is a solid storage product overall. It has low noise, lots of capacity and is capable of pushing out excellent performance in the right usage model.

The Seagate Barracuda is one incredibly fast drive and the proof is in the numbers posted above. Besides being really fast, its also pretty quiet. When idle you'll barely be able to tell if the drive is even powered up or not. Under load, the drive was still quieter than most other drives we have in the lab. Another area where the drive excels is the amount of heat it generates- its certainly a cool customer. While we don't have any apparatus to measure the heat, you'll have to take our word for it being one of the coolest drives we've tested of late.

The Barracuda ES.2 isn't completely without merit, of course. The drive blitzed our disk-intensive iPEAK multitasking workloads, often beating opponents by significant margins. It also offers extremely high throughput in synthetic transfer rate tests and when reading and copying extremely large files. Random access times are among the lowest we've measured for a drive spinning at 7,200RPM, as well. But those flashes of brilliance don't burn brightly enough to illuminate an otherwise bleak performance outlook, especially considering the nearly $50 price premium that the drive commands over the Barracuda 7200.11. Seagate may well address whatever is keeping the ES.2 from reaching its full potential, but until then, the drive is a tough sell.