Seagate Barracuda ES.2
1 Terabyte SATA Enterprise Level Hard Drive

     It wasn't long ago when just the thought of building a reliable server caused a loud sucking sound in my head... Much like the sound of bathtub water draining, but instead of water it's dollar bills going down the drain. In the past, you could easily spend 5 to 10k on a file server, especially if you wanted to store mass amounts of data. Over the years the costs of building a server has gone down tremendously, however enterprise level data storage can still be very expensive, especially SCSI or Small Computer Systems Interface hard drives. In the past, if you wanted speed and reliability in a server, the only way to go was SCSI. SCSI interface hard drives were, and still are, very fast and reliable, but the days of SCSI's reign as king are numbered. This is due to less expensive and just as reliable methods of storing such massive amounts of data. One of the methods that has been around for quite some time is the Serial ATA interface hard drive. However, you just can't plug in any old SATA hard drive and expect it to last in a demanding 24/7 environment. With enterprise level SCSI hard drives you could expect years of 24/7 operation with very little or even zero failures. Normally, standard off the shelf desktop hard drives just are not designed to take that sort of punishment. This is where the Barracuda ES (Enterprise Storage) hard drives come in. Now that same bullet proof reliability we've come to expect from SCSI is available in a less expensive form.

     I have always been a big SCSI hard drive fan and we've even tested several Seagate Cheetah hard drives here at Club Overclocker. But with SATA interface hard drives taking over much of the SCSI hard drive market, it's a real treat to obtain a pair of 1 Terabyte Barracuda ES.2 drives for testing. So move over SCSI, here comes the Barracuda ES.2, Seagate's second generation of the enterprise storage Serial ATA hard drive!

 
A pair of Seagate 1Tb Barracuda ES.2 Hard drives in their protective packaging.

     So why do we need a pair of these 1 Terabyte monsters? It's all about the RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Drives). We've had a long history with Seagate and we actually started out by bench testing those Seagate's Cheetah SCSI hard drives years ago. One of the major selling points of SCSI was the ability to run massive RAID arrays so we've continued on with that tradition by testing hardware and software raid with every Seagate desktop hard drive we've tested. It's true, most people do not have the need for RAID. But if you are a serious gamer or have the need for a file server, RAID is the only way to go because of the speed, the ability to backup data automatically, and the ability to swap out hard drives without loosing data. Let's talk a little bit about RAID and what it can do for you...

The Seagate 1Tb Barracuda ES.2 hard drives.

So what is RAID?

     RAID stands for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks or Redundant Array of Independent Disks. Simply put, RAID is a data storage scheme that uses multiple hard drives to replicate data among the drives. Depending on the configuration of the RAID or "RAID Level", the benefits of running RAID can be increased by data integrity, fault-tolerance, throughput or capacity.

     Years ago the use of RAID had only been seen in expensive servers, but in recent years RAID technology has become inexpensive and readily available to the average computer user. Nowadays it's hard to find a motherboard that doesn't have some sort of RAID offering.

     If you would like to read more about RAID, please visit our RAID Guide here.