Barracuda ES, worth the price over 7200.10?

[MaxBurn]

ST3750640AS 7200.10 or ST3750640NS Barracuda ES.

About to pull the trigger on a 750g drive and I am looking at these two. The box will usually be on 24x7 and I will have two of these drives in a mirror. The Barracuda ES is a little more server oriented by the sound of it which seems to soot my use but is that just markitecture?

I will have one very small boot partition and the rest will be storage. I am planning to have a second single 7200.9 or raptor 74g for workspace just because I already have them around.

Is the Barracuda ES price premium worth it? Talking about $100 for the two drives. Going to order Sunday.

 

[Pradeep]

The ES does do better in RAIDs. But from what I understand they still aren't as capable/reliable as SAS drives. Only a problem if you really hammer the disks 24/7.

 

[ddrueding]

I'm thinking that the only differences are firmware and possibly cherry-picked motors/actuators. I don't think it could possibly be worth the price difference unless performance/reliability were at a serious premium.

 

[Santilli]

I just was looking at this on newegg. The newer, perpendicular drive seems to be both expensive, and unreliable, not a great combination. I went with this drive, for 119 dollars:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

5 year warranty, and reliable track record. The 750's don't seem to be cost per gig reasonable yet.

Dr S

 

[MaxBurn]

The idea is that these two 750gb drives in mirror on my onboard ICH8R with two partitions will replace the below setup so going with two 500's isn't really an option. Neither is deleting data, actually I am looking foreword to some extra space again as I am nearly full now on the archive RAID5. Simplicity and speed also are side benefits, something I won't have if I stay with a RAID5 because I went with smaller drives.

SCSI ID 2 3ware 7500-8 ATA RAID Controller
Array Unit 0 Mirror (RAID 1) 60.02 GB OK - Boot drive
o Port 0 WDC WD600LB-00DNA0 60.02 GB OK
o Port 1 WDC WD600LB-00DNA0 60.02 GB OK
Array Unit 4 Striped with Parity 64K (RAID 5) 480.12 GB OK - Archive
o Port 4 SAMSUNG SP1614N 160.04 GB OK
o Port 5 SAMSUNG SP1614N 160.04 GB OK
o Port 6 SAMSUNG SP1614N 160.04 GB OK
o Port 7 SAMSUNG SP1614N 160.04 GB OK

As a side note, this array used to be eight 60gb drives! Really nice technology moving along like this.

 

[LunarMist]

I just was looking at this on newegg. The newer, perpendicular drive seems to be both expensive, and unreliable, not a great combination. I went with this drive, for 119 dollars:
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3500630AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM

5 year warranty, and reliable track record. The 750's don't seem to be cost per gig reasonable yet.

Dr S

I've been using a couple of the 750GB drives since they wer first introduced and one runs almost continuously. It was retail packed drive, not an OEM one that the Newegg employees may have played football with and then packed in a layer of bubble wrap.

 

[ddrueding]

Since I knew I was building a RAID-5 array, I started with 750GB drives. Now as 750GB drives come down in price, I can continue adding without having too many drives total. I'm falling below 400GB free on the main array, so I'll be adding another drive soon.

 

[MaxBurn]

ddrueling: looks like you are happy with your 7200.10s in an array?

 

[ddrueding]

Loving them. Even with just the 6, I'm getting 130MB/s reads and writes. I've never had an issue, even though they are presently 50C+ 24/7 (due to poor case design).

 

[MaxBurn]

Yes, I heard in about every review that they run hot. What about noise, half I read say they are noisy and the other half says they are the quietest drive ever.

 

[ddrueding]

When I did some testing, they were very quiet. But now they are sitting next to 5 raptors

 

[Stereodude]

They both have 5 year warranties, so IMHO, no the ES isn't worth anything over a 7200.10.

 

[Bozo]

Don't all Seagate drives have 5 year warenties now??

Bozo :joker:

 

[Stereodude]

Don't all Seagate drives have 5 year warenties now??

Bozo :joker:

Yes, except for external drives.

 

[MaxBurn]

OK, so I went with the 7200.10 from newegg, lets see how they survive the flight across the country. I intend to spinrite them as soon as they get here. As a special bonus they are coming with two 1gig really small (and slow apparently) USB drives.

 

[ddrueding]

I have never had a problem with Seagates from Newegg. Only WDs, and I blame WD. I love the Sony Mini USB thumbdrives, but they are quite slow. All that I care is that they are fast enough to stream MP3s off of.

On another note, does anyone here know the exact spacing for the mounting screws on 3.5" HDDs? I'm designing something.

 

[MaxBurn]

Spinrite has them right now and I will probably kill that at three or four hours in, total time would be just over seven hours it's estimating. No problems yet, infact I had a little scare, I couldn't hear them spin up at all, very quiet.

Well newegg drive shipping has either been spotty or corrected, I thought these were shipped rather well, pretty big box considering whats inside.

 

[mubs]

The problem many times is that the insides are packed so loosely that the contents shift around quite easily. I won't be buying disk drives from Newegg again.

In my experience, eWiz and Directron consistently package drives better.

 

[timwhit]

I ordered 3 Samsung 500GB drives 2 weeks ago from Newegg and I have to say that they were packed pretty poorly. There was not enough peanuts in the box so the bubble wrapped drive was right up against the edge of the box. Also the bubble wrapping was not even sufficient in my opinion. One edge of the plastic shell was not covered by any bubbles at all. Maybe I will look elsewhere next time I buy drives. Plus, FedEx had the decency to crush all the boxes during shipment. The boxes looked like they had been through a terrible experiment in box torture.

 

[ddrueding]

My last shipment from Newegg was great, including the hard drives; wrapped like MaxBurn's.

My complaint is that they left $10k worth of parts on my doorstep. I'm not worried about thieves around here, but it was baking in the sun. The packing tape was a little gooey when I opened it.

 

[mubs]

Tim's experience exactly mirrors mine. Maybe the reason for the contradicting experiences people have with Newegg is because their different warehouses pack differently. IIRC, my drives came from Tennessee.

 

[Mercutio]

It probably helps a lot that I order in much larger volumes than most people but I don't really have reason to complain about Newegg's packing.

They've sent me some hilarious recycled boxes, though.

 

[timwhit]

Tim's experience exactly mirrors mine. Maybe the reason for the contradicting experiences people have with Newegg is because their different warehouses pack differently. IIRC, my drives came from Tennessee.

Based on tracking numbers my drives came from New Jersey.

 

[MaxBurn]

Based on tracking numbers my drives came from New Jersey.

Mine came from CA.

Could be simply different warehouses methods too...

 

[Bozo]

Based on tracking numbers my drives came from New Jersey.

New Jersey? That explains it. ;-)

Bozo :joker:

 

[ddrueding]

Mine are all from CA. They do weird things, though. Several dozen parts in many large boxes all overnighted from City of Industry, CA; and a single stick of DDR400 1GB overnighted from New Jersey in it's own large box.

 

[Santilli]

The 500 gig 7.10 does 32-1028k files in the 68-70 range for writes according to ATTO, and, slower reads???

Dr G