[TSullivan]

Seagate's Constellation enterprise hard drives come in 6Gbps SAS and SATA interfaces; we pit them against one another using the second-gen Constellation.2 2.5" drive and fifth-gen Constellation ES.2 3.5" drive. The following models are participating in this review:

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[continuum]

Psst, your part #s aren't quite right... Seagate ends drives with "NS" for nearline SATA, and "SS" for SAS. The 650 vs. 651 at the end indicated cache or something being different, I forget what it was...


Power consumption does look good and I see these drives are down to $330 each, which isn't bad. I wonder when the 1TB/platter nearline drives will hit (I could use a 4x1TB platter nearline...).

Also any other benchmarks of their competition? I just noticed the performance database isn't the place to go for that... although I don't think SR has reviewed the Ultrastar 7K3000 or anything so maybe not yet?

[Tyler]

How can the ES.2 SAS be so much poorer performing than the SATA? Is there any word from Seagate on this? I was expecting to by about 100 of these for a new build-out, but now I'm nervous.

[continuum]

I think it's a firmware or a driver issue with SR's testbed that the SAS version is having. I wouldn't sweat it.

[Tyler]

Hopefully they do a follow-up. I'm going to try to find other reviews on this drive to see if it was just SR that's having the issue.

[Kevin OBrien]

I am not sure it could be counted as a driver quirk on our system when the Constellation.2 SAS didn't have the same problem. If you look at the server charts the only one it maintained a similar speed to the rest of the group was the web-server which stands out being the only real-only test, with the others being a mix of R/W.

[fallbreak]

Have you guys contacted Seagate or have they contacted you? Would like to hear the outcome of this discussion. Thanks!

[lutjens]

Just wondering if anything further has come out of this. I was just about to buy 14 of these and I'm glad I checked out the review.

[Kevin OBrien]

lutjens, on 04 July 2011 - 11:23 PM, said:

Just wondering if anything further has come out of this. I was just about to buy 14 of these and I'm glad I checked out the review.

Going to shoot a question over to them again today and see if we can get a replacement to re-test.

[David Szabados]

Kevin OBrien, on 05 July 2011 - 02:53 PM, said:

Going to shoot a question over to them again today and see if we can get a replacement to re-test.

Hi Kevin - I thought I'd come check out the forums here as it's been awhile. In anycase, I checked and heard back from Seagate engineering and they stated that on many of the SAS models, the prescan feature is turned on by default. This forces a read after every write and is a data-integrity checking feature. This would explain the 'flat line' experience of the 3TB model in one of the performance benchmarks. Our SAS manual talks about enabling/disabling various features through a sw utility, but we'll go ahead and send over another set so that you can test the drives with prescan off.

David Szabados
Seagate Technology