Seagate Constellation 500GB HDD

Tuesday, October 06, 2009

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This is a 500GB, 7200 RPM, 2.5 inch hard disk from the Constellation line of disks from Seagate. It is ideal for enterprises and has features for business critical storage systems. The drive can be used in nearline environments as it offers enterprise-class reliability for 24x7 operations.

And being a 2.5 inch drive it is best suited for space constrained data centers. The drive also features rotational vibration tolerance that helps to maintain drive performance even in high-vibration environments (like in a data center). For business critical applications, the drive failure could be a potential threat: Seagate Constellation drive has a targeted 1.2 million hours Mean Time Between Failure rating that ensures robust performance.

The drive also boasts of being energy efficient as it uses PowerChoice technology that results in lower power consumption during slow or idle periods. We tested the drive on a Intel Quad Core based machine with 2GB RAM, the same setup was used for reviewing Hitachi E7K1000 1TB drive (reviewed in Feb'09) which was also an enterprise class drive.

The Constellation drive gave an average transfer rate of 72.4 MB/sec in HD Tune benchmark with an access time of 13.7 ms, whereas Hitachi E7K1000 clocked 96.9 MB/sec average transfer rate. The Constellation drive being energy efficient consumes just 2.9W of power at idle mode while Hitachi E7K1000 drive consumed 5.2W of power in the same mode. With a smaller form factor and low power profile, this drive can be used in blade servers as well, besides being used as high-density nearline storage solution for apps like backup and restore, video surveillance, medical imaging, etc.

Bottomline: Considering its small form factor, performance and power efficiency, this drive is ideal for green data centers.

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