Two 2TB Hard Drives For Storage Applications, Reviewed

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Samsung and Seagate are each offering new high-capacity drives that strive to cram tons of data into a 3.5" form factor. Today's battle is the eco-friendly Spinpoint against the nearline Constellation, low power against business-class. Which one is best?

Comparison Table And Test Setup

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Manufacturer Samsung Seagate
Model EcoGreen F3 Constellation ES
Model Number HD203WI ST32000644NS
Form Factor 3.5" 3.5"
Capacity 2,000GB 2,000GB
Spindle Speed 5,400 RPM 7,200 RPM
Other Capacities 1,500GB 500, 1,000GB
Platters 4 4
Cache 32MB 64MB
NCQ Yes Yes
Interface SATA 3Gb/s SATA 3Gb/s
Operating Temperature 0-60°C 5-60°C
Specified Idle Power 5.4W 7W
Measured Idle Power 4.1W 6.4W
Operating Shock (2 ms, read) 70 G 70 G
Warranty 3 Years 5 Years

This review deals only with these two drives, but there are two more products that require consideration: Hitachi’s Ultrastar A7K2000, a 7,200 RPM business class drive, and two options by Western Digital, the Caviar Green that compares to Samsung’s F3EG and the RE4 (RAID Edition), which is more similar to the Constellation ES.

Test Setup

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System Hardware
Hardware Details
CPU Intel Core i7-920 (45 nm, 2.66 GHz, 8MB L3 Cache)
Motherboard (Sockel 1366) Supermicro X8SAX Revision: 1.1, Chipset: Intel X58 + ICH10R, BIOS: 1.0B
RAM 3 x 1GB DDR3-1333 Corsair CM3X1024-1333C9DHX
HDD Seagate NL35 400GB ST3400832NS, 7,200 RPM, SATA/150, 8MB Cache
Power Supply OCZ EliteXstream 800W OCZ800EXS-EU
Benchmarks
Performance Measurements h2benchw 3.12PCMark Vantage 1.0
I/O Performance IOMeter 2006.07.27Fileserver-BenchmarkWebserver-BenchmarkDatabase-BenchmarkWorkstation-BenchmarkStreaming ReadsStreaming Writes
System Software & Drivers
Driver Details
Operating System Windows Vista Ultimate SP1
Intel Chipset Chipset Installation Utility 9.1.0.1007
AMD Graphics Radeon 8.12
Intel Matrix Storage 8.7.0.1007