Reviews for Seagate Barracuda ES.2 ST3500320NS 500 GB Internal Hard Drive

Superior? Hard to say... but rated for longer life

Strengths: Better vibrational tolerance, rated lower annual failure rate than regular Barracuda's

Weakness: Slightly more expensive than regular Barracuda's, no performance gains

I bought 4 drives after I lost an HD, determined to avoid data loss, I created a Raid 1+0 in OS X. Any RAID junkies might be asking "Why not RAID5 or 6?" Without a hardware controller OS X cannot manage RAID5 or 6, and bootable RAID5 cards are very pricey. Notably hardware RAIDs aren't nearly as easy to manage as they require using the card's Bios as opposed to the luxury of the OS. Inevitably it was much cheaper to use RAID1+0 even if somewhat wayward.

RAID with my Mac Pro, internal SATA, Softrraid 1+0

Xbench

Results 115.36
System Info
Xbench Version 1.3
System Version 10.5.3 (9D34)
Physical RAM 6144 MB
Model MacPro3,1
Drive Type SuperDrive
Disk Test 115.36
Sequential 167.82
Uncached Write 264.18 162.20 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 274.00 155.03 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 73.70 21.57 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 353.22 177.52 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random 87.89
Uncached Write 32.63 3.45 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write 288.73 92.43 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read 158.06 1.12 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read 196.90 36.54 MB/sec [256K blocks]
How reliable are the ES2s compared to the regular Seagate's? Hard to say... hopefully I won't have to find out anytime soon.

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Seagate Barracuda ES.2 500GB SATA300 ST3500320NS

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