Three 2.5" SAS Drives: Enterprise Data Giants, Compared

By Manuel Masiero, Achim Roos
published

Currently, 2.5" enterprise drives are leaving their 3.5” competitors behind. They're faster, more flexible, and now they offer comparable capacities (we're up to 1 TB now). In this piece, it's Hitachi versus Seagate battling for high-density supremacy.

Benchmark Results: Temperature And Power Consumption

Thanks to its lower spindle speed of 7200 RPM, the Seagate Constellation.2 stays cooler than both of the other drives.

In idle, the Hitachi Ultrastar C10K600 runs with the least power, but the two Seagate drives are also convincing with moderate values not exceeding 5.2 W. The power consumption of all three test candidates rises little, even at maximum data throughput. However, the Seagate Savvio 10K.5 uses more power than the other devices in the test bed.

Manuel Masiero
2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • compton
    Toms with some more review niceness. Thanks for another interesting article. I don't think mechanical storage is going anywhere soon. For better and worse we'll still have it around for a long, long time to come. Even when SSDs hit that magical speed/capacity/cost point to be ubiquitous for mainstream consumers, enterprises will still need HDDs as part of their storage needs. HDDs are at least a known quantity that are still getting better.
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  • bit_user
    3rd paragraph: "have to be taken into considered". You also didn't mention capacity and cost/GB, where mechanical disks still reign supreme.

    Also, why not benchmark a 3.5" disk, but only use the outer portion. If both that and a 2.5" have the same density and rotational velocity, then the 3.5" should win due to higher I/O speeds resulting from higher linear velocity.
    Reply