How much storage space is enough storage space? Well that is going to depend on each individual. What I consider to be an ample amount will not be enough for Joe down the street. Having developed the habit of keeping all my files backed up on a NAS (Network Attached Storage), I rarely go to crazy on HDD space in my computers. I normally purchase what is decently priced at the time of the build. With large capacity drives coming down in price, it's not uncommon to find good deals on 500GB ~ 1TB hard drives these days. If you want to save a little more of that hard earned money, you can even go as far as purchasing a Recertified hard drive. Today we are going to take a look at a Seagate Barracuda ES.2 750GB recertified hard drive from Geeks.com.
First Impression:
Quote from Seagate:
The Barracuda ES.2 drive is the perfect solution for high-capacity
enterprise storage applications such as the migration of
mission-critical transactional data, from tier 1 to tier 2 (nearline)
storage, where dollars/GB and GB/watt are a primary concern. With
energy-saving PowerTrim™ features, superior rotational vibration
tolerance and a choice of SATA or SAS interfaces, the Barracuda ES.2
drive provides world-leading technology and value.
Although the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 Hard Drive is geared toward the enterprise solutions. There are situations where the Barracuda ES.2 can come into play for the mainstream consumer or small business owners. Granted the drive does come at a slightly elevated cost compared to the mainstream drives, but it offers a longer Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF). For example: The Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 has an MTBF of 750,000 hours while the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 has a MTBF of 1.2 Million hours.Those looking to build a server for the home or small office might see a greater advantage in going with an enterprise drives.
The first thing that caught my eye was how well the drive was packed. Every hard drive that I have purchased over the years has come loosely packed in a standard box with packing peanuts surrounding it. Opening this one up really surprised me. For someone to actually cause physical damage to this drive during shipping, they would have to really work at it to succeed.
Features:
Perpendicular recording technology for maximum capacity
24x7 operation and 1.2 M hrs. MTBF
Dynamic power saving using Seagate PowerTrim™ technology
Broad spectrum rotational vibration tolerance at 12.5 rads/s2
Error recovery control - quick error resolution to prevent system timeouts
Workload management to ensure operational reliability
Quick and robust download with firmware security checks
Write Same command for efficient RAID initialization
I''ve been using these exact drives as my ONLY choice of large scale storage at home. In fact, I noticed your test drive was a re certified drive by the green stripe that runs around the edge of the sticker on the drive itself. Re certified drives are actually superior to brand new drives for reliability based on the fact that the previous failure that caused the drive to be returned and rebuilt also initiated a far more intense re-testing procedure by Seagate before the drive could be recertified for use. Recert drives are therefore less likely to fail then a brand new one.
I''m currently running 4 of these badboys a RAID 5 setup for mass storage purposes. All my music, movies, games, and apps are stored on them and it''s the most solid and trustworthy RAID arrays I''ve ever dealt with. 2.25Tb of reliable storage makes me a happy techy :D
