jmke

SCSI HAS LONG RULED the enterprise world, but Serial ATA is slowly creeping into corporate server rooms. Serial ATA simply can't be beaten when it comes to storage density, and when you're paying for not only the drives, but also the rack they sit in, density can be an even more important metric than performance.

Today, the highest capacity SCSI drives top out at 300GB—just 60% of the capacity of today's enterprise-class Serial ATA drives, which are available up to 500GB. Seagate has just raised the bar even higher, introducing a new Barracuda ES hard drive with a whopping 750GB of storage. To put that into perspective, consider the storage capacity of a four-drive 1U rack server running RAID 5. With 300GB SCSI drives, you won't even break one terabyte. 500GB Serial ATA drives could give you 1.5TB of redundant capacity, while an array of 750GB Barracuda ES drives would offer a cool 2.25TB, all in the same physical space.

The Barracuda ES's owes its freakish capacity to the perpendicular recording technology it shares with Seagate's desktop-oriented Barracuda 7200.10. Physically, the drives are nearly identical. However, the Barracuda ES packs firmware optimizations that promise better performance under more demanding loads, an attribute whose appeal is extends beyond the enterprise world and into the enthusiast's realm.

How does the Barracuda ES compare with other enterprise-class Serial ATA hard drives? Is it really any faster than the Barracuda 7200.10? Read on to find out.

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