Four Terabytes Of Storage…But…

One thing that I really love about being the owner of Futurelooks is the fact that every day holds a surprise. Today, I was surprised by Seagate who sent along FOUR One Terabyte Barracude ES.2 hard drives. Unlike the regular run of the mill Seagate drives, the Enterprise Level ones have a higher level of reliability and are optimized for use in servers and network attached storage systems. They also aren’t a bad option for people who want reliability over performance. Things like power saving and vibration dampening technology built into the drives typically lower the scores slightly. However, in a server room with hundreds of these things, power and vibration are important. Since I’ll be reviewing a few network attached storage devices in the near future, their timing couldn’t be better.

Like any man who loves gadgets, I quickly ripped open boxes to have a look. Upon closer inspection, I noticed something funny with the SATA power and data connection. They weren’t keyed like my other SATA drives. Something was wrong…

A quick look at the front of the drive revealed that these weren’t SATA drives at all. They were in fact Serial Attached SCSI drives or SAS drives for short. DOH! Although the Barracuda ES.2’s have been out for a little while now in the SATA configuration, the higher end SAS version that is typically used in high end servers and workstations, had not even been released yet. So why do I even have these?

After some investigation, it appears that our friends at Seagate decided to send them to me in hopes that I would write about them. Although I have nothing that supports the SAS interface, it appears that the communication was expected as Seagate was standing by to send me an LSI SAS controller card to give these things a whirl. I’ve actually always wanted to give SAS drives a try because of their increased performance, but their added cost and lack of support in the consumer marketplace didn’t really make sense for the content we produce at Futurelooks.

SAS, as the logical successor to SCSI, has a lot going for it. For starters, it is totally backwards compatible with SATA.  That means, if you have a SAS controller, you can use it with SATA drives. So, if you have the controller on your motherboard, and don’t want to spend the 30% premium for SAS drives, or maybe you want to use your existing SATA drives, you can. The only thing you can’t do is use a SAS drive with a SATA controller.

Seagate said that these particular drives, launching on April 7th, would start to close that price gap between SATA and SAS, and hopefully, open up the possibility of seeing SAS as a regular fixture on desktop motherboards. Or better yet, a consolidation of all the drive interfaces into SAS, that supports lower cost SATA and high end SAS so that consumers can buy either one based on their needs and go. Right now, we’ve got several SCSI interfaces, IDE, and SATA  to deal with so a common interface would be good news for everyone. 

I can’t wait to get these plugged in and running! Look for my review coming up soon at Futurelooks with some real world, everyday use tests and a minimum of graphs that make you want to curl up in a ball and cry.