Seagate

In my previous post I talked about Western Digital RE4-GP 2TB drive problems. In this post I present my test results for 2TB drives from Seagate and Hitachi. The test setup is the same as for the RE4-GP testing, except that I only tested 4 drives from each manufacturer. Unlike the enterprise class WD RE4-GP and Hitachi Ultrastar A7K2000 drives, the Seagate Barracuda LP drive is a desktop drive. The equivalent should have been a Seagate Constellation ES drive, but as far as I know the 2TB drives are not yet available. ...

I’ve been a longtime user of Adaptec SATA RAID cards (3805, 5805, 51245), but over the years I’ve become more energy saving conscious, and the Adaptec controllers did not support Windows power management. My workstations are normally running in the “Balanced” power mode so that they will go to sleep after an hour, but sometimes I need to run computationally intensive tasks that leave the machines running 24/7. During these periods the disks don’t need to be on and I want the disks to spin down, like they would had they been directly connected and not in a RAID configuration. ...