Posted on Wednesday, April 09 2008 @ 1:15 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
Seagate launches 1TB Barracuda ES.2 enterprise hard drives today with a Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) interface. The firm claims these drives offer an average performance boost of 135% over SATA-interface drives along with robust enterprise features.
“The explosion of content in enterprise environments is driving the need for faster data access and bandwidth that Seagate’s 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives can deliver with a SAS interface,” said Sherman Black, Seagate senior vice president and general manager, Seagate Enterprise Compute Business. “SAS dual-port capability with redundancy, improved performance and data integrity make this drive the perfect low-cost/GB enterprise-ready drive for our customers.”
SAS also enables greater system-design and integration flexibility for solution providers who are eager to offer even greater value options to their customers. “The higher performance and inherently lower total cost of ownership (TCO) make Barracuda ES.2 drives with SAS a perfect choice for many of our customers,” said Joe Cousins, vice president, Marketing at Bell Microproducts. “With the added enterprise features found within SAS all merging into a lower-cost package, we anticipate our customers will be very interested in building and deploying SAS-based systems with Seagate® drives.”
With the introduction of the Barracuda ES.2 drive, Seagate is first to provide customers with a SAS interface option in addition to its SATA model, which began shipping last year. For major system providers including HP, SAS offers greater levels of data integrity and performance for business-critical and nearline enterprise environments.
“As a leader in the enterprise, HP ProLiant servers and storage technologies help customers to manage their datacenter infrastructure with confidence,” said Ron Noblett, vice president, Industry Standard Servers, HP. “We’re pleased to align with Seagate for their hard drive expertise as the new SAS 1TB drive is added to the HP portfolio of Midline drives. These drives will provide the ‘pennies per GB economics’ of SATA Midline with additional performance as well as the dual port capability our external storage customers demand.”
The Barracuda ES.2 hard drive with SAS is optimized for business-critical and nearline enterprise storage environments that demand native enterprise host compatibility. This means no SATA interposer card costs and complexity, along with all the advantages including dual-port, full duplex capability and a host of enterprise class features for high system-level performance and reliability.
Seagate’s PowerTrim™ technology is integrated into the Barracuda ES.2 drive family and dynamically manages drive power consumption at all levels of activity. With PowerTrim technology, the Barracuda ES.2 drive addresses the IT dilemma facing energy-constrained data centers by delivering a 20% reduction in overall drive power consumption and a best-in-class 55% reduction in watts-per-gigabyte. And moving to SAS gives customers up to 38% improvement in IOPs-per-Watt over SATA.
The Barracuda ES.2 drive family’s robust features stand out in performance, reliability, capacity, and energy efficiency. Among them is its new RVFF™ (Rotational Vibration Feed Forward) system, designed to sustain performance in densely-packed multi-drive systems. The Barracuda ES.2 drive also boosts reliability with an industry-best unrecoverable error rate that is 10 times better than desktop class drives and a 1.2 million hour Mean Time Between Failure at full 24 x 7 data availability.
The Barracuda ES.2 drive family operates at 7,200-rpm spin speeds, delivers average seek times of 8.5ms, and delivers up to 1TB of capacity with other models available in 500GB and 750GB. It includes Seagate’s industry-leading five-year limited warranty.
