[Brian]

The Constellation ES is Seagate's 4th generation 3.5" 7200 RPM enterprise-class hard drive. The drives come in 500GB, 1TB and 2TB capacities and support both SATA II and SAS interfaces. The Constellation ES isn't all about high capacity and performance though; Seagate's high on their power management and temperature tolerance for enterprise applications. The entire line also offers self-encrypting drive technology as an optional feature. With a spec sheet like this, it's hard to imagine wanting anything else in a high-capacity enterprise-class storage solution.

Full Review

[Brian]

We're happy to post the first HDD review on this site in some time.

As an aside, this review is about 70% of what we'll have in a few weeks. We're working on a proprietary series of benchmarks that will use a consistent set of real world scenarios that we'll run for each drive. Once that is complete, we'll update this and any other reviews with those benchmarks as well.

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Update - here's what we've been working on...please offer feedback.

[[ETA]MrSpadge]

Quote

the Constellation ES reached a maximum temperature of 103F as recorded with a Fluke IR thermometer.

Please don't make all of us non-US guys google the conversion to °C every time we read your reviews!

MrS

[Brian]

LOL - okay, okay. We'll post both measurements.

Would that be good? And should we toss in Kelvin too?

[kittle]

Actually us US-based folks are already used to seeing tempratures for PCs expressed in 'C'

[TSullivan]

kittle, on 12 March 2010 - 06:19 PM, said:

Actually us US-based folks are already used to seeing tempratures for PCs expressed in 'C'

I was actually thinking the same thing. Going forward I think we are going to present temp info in celcius.

[Alec]

Congrats and good job to the team. This will really help me choose the best storage medium to use. I'm currently running out of space with my current 1TB hard drive and I need to buy a new 2TB so that I will have more space to work on.

I check the link about the benchmarks. I never knew that hard disks perform differently with gaming, viewing movies, and using the computer for work. About the workstation, what programs are you going to use for the testing of the hard disk's performance?

[TSullivan]

The workstation profile is still in the works. It will be a trace of photo editing in Photoshop, downloading torrents (Knoppix Linux ISO), zipping files, and a few other areas we havent agreed on yet.

The differences come from the fact that certain processes are sequential write/read heavy (the HTPC one for example), sequential/mixed random read heavy (gaming), and mixed random/seq small and large file (workstation).

[Alec]

So you mean that HTPC will write on the hard disk? If we are copying movies into the hard disk, will you consider that as HTPC or workstation?

I don't know if my next question is related here. Why is it that it takes longer for me to copy 2 large files (like movies) at the same time rather than copying one file then proceed on the second after the first was done?