Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB Hard Drive

Performance Summary: The Seagate Barracuda ES.2 1TB drive generally performed well, with a few exceptions.  The Barracuda ES.2's HD Tach, HD Tune, and most of the Sandra results were impressive in light of the competition. But the drive's PCMark Vantage results and the Sandra Sequential and Random Read and Write scores, on the other hand, left something to be desired.
 

Although the Barracuda ES.2 generally offers excellent performance overall, this drive is first and foremost a giant when it comes to storage capacity. Recall that the Barracuda ES.2 is an enterprise-class drive intended for installations where reliability is the top priority. If reliability and massive storage are a must, such as in a file or backup server, then we would definitely take a close look at the 1TB Barracuda ES.2. Drives of this size may seem like overkill to many of you, but they are quite handy if you are stuck in a situation where you have to maximize storage capacity while minimizing space.

As you may have expected, the 1TB Barracuda ES.2 doesn't come cheap. At approximately $310 at the time of this writing, it actually costs about $40 more than its 7200.11 brother, which as we pointed out before, is almost the same drive. When installing drives in a demanding server environment, though, the ES.2's much higher MTBF rating (1.2 million hours versus 750,000 for the 7200.11) and higher rotational vibration tolerance are more meaningful and help justify the extra cost. One thing that both the ES.2 and the 7200.11 offer that is better than thier competition is a 5-year warranty. Kudos to Seagate for that.

Seagate has many great storage lines, and the Barracuda ES.2 appears to be another that the company can proudly add to the list. The 1TB Barracuda ES.2 proved to be an excellent performer when compared to our other test drives. In addition to running relatively quietly, it boasts a 32MB cache, an impressive 1.2 million hour MTBF, an excellent rotational vibration tolerance, error recovery control, and an industry-leading 5-year warranty.

We want to share a few extra thoughts and notes about the 1TB Barracuda ES.2 before we close out this article, however. If you don't specifically require the high MTBF rating of the ES.2 drive, but still want excellent performance and Seagate's 5-year warranty, we'd strongly recommend opting for the 1TB 7200.11.  Although we were not able to make the direct comparison on the same system in our labs, the 1TB 7200.11 drive reportedly outperforms the 1TB ES.2 in many benchmarks, which is unexpected considering that the foundation for the two drives is similar. Additionally, we have seen some reports of 1TB Barracuda ES.2 drives failing and arriving DOA.  We have had a positive experience so far with the 1TB ES.2 (firmware version SN03), but we felt it prudent to provide a few words of caution and bring to your attention some of the other information we have seen. We always encourage our readers to do thorough research before making any purchase.