Introduction

It gives me a great pleasure to present to you Seagate! Seagate has very recently became UMLan Inc's partner and we are honored of having them under our wings. Today we are going to be taking a look at the newest family of enterprise level hard drives, Constellation series. Constellation series consists of Constellation hard drives and Constellation ES hard drives. The Constellation hard drives are offered in 2.5 inch hard drives in both 3 Gbps SATA and SAS 2.0 in the capacities of 160Gb and 500GB. The Constellation ES hard drives are offered in SATA and SAS in the capacities of 500Gb, 1Tb and 2Tb. Today we are going to be looking at SATA Constellation hard drives and see what they have to offer in the enterprise/bushiness class.

About the Product

Following information is taken from the Seagate website.

The Constellation drive offers the lowest power consumption of any enterprise drive on the market. Providing the maximum capacity in a compact 2.5-inch hard drive, it enables OEMs and system designers to provide an eco-friendly nearline server and storage solution for those space-constrained IT environments.

Now that we got basic information out of the way, lets take a closer look at Constellation SATA.

Closer look

Seagate Constellation SATA		Model Number *ST9500530NS*

Constellation series comes with PowerChoice technology which allows both drives to operate with decreased power consumption. Overall power consumption is decreased to a maximum 54%. This is a great step closer to the "green energy" technology. With less power consumption you would expect these drives and enclosure to minimize your electric bill. As we all know the real state and power are two most pricey things in the data center. Keeping all these figures to the minimum is very important not only for your pocket but also for the environment. Less power means, less cooling. Less cooling means better hot air recycling in the data centers.

Front Shot		Rear Shot

Constellation drives are not that much different from your every day laptop 2.5 inch hard drives. We have the same basic layout of the hard disks and the IO interface circuit. The weight of the Constellation is a bit heavier than your standard 2.5 inch drive. This is due to the additional hard disks inside. I would like to mention now that Constellation drives are about 1/8 of an inch taller than 2.5 inch drive, but it is the same length.

Sata connection		Serial Sticker

As i ve mentioned earlier Constellation drives come in two flavors SATA and SAS 2.0. These two drives are identical with an exeption of the connection. The SATA is capable of performing at 3Gbps and the SAS 2.0 is able to perform at 6Gbps. This presents us with fast and faster read and write speeds. How is it possible to store this much data and yes not sacrifice in speed? You may ask. Seagate uses a perpendicular recording technology to write to disk and by doing so they increase the density and reliability of these drives.

Size comparison		Size comparison

Above you can see the size comparison of the traditional 2.5 inch hard drive to Constellation SATA hard drive. Yes the size is a bit bigger but you can still find enclosures to use these in. Seagate believe that the future will convert in to these small form factor storage units. I am going to have to agree with Seagate on this one. If we look back on the hard drive evolution, we have been reducing the size while increasing the storage capacities and speed of the hard drives for decades. So no doubt we are going to see more and more small factor hard drives or storage units in a very near future.

Dell SAS 5 ira set up

We are going to be using DELL SAS 5ira raid controller to check out some benchmarks and stats on these drives. We would like to see how these drives will perform in the raid. For out testing purposes we are going to be running these in raid 1. Let take a closer look at these Constellation hard drives in Raid 1 and see what they have to bring to the table.

Testing

HD Tach 8 MB vs 32 MB

Our first benchmark we have performed was HD Tach 8 MB and 32 MB test. From our test we have concluded that the Burst speed of the Constellation is around 235 MB/s and the average read speed was 77 MB/s. This is pretty much what you should expect from an SATA 3Gbps connection.

Sandra Benchmark

Our second benchmark was performed with Sandra to see how the Constellation stands against similar drives on the market today. Constellation performed well in this category by beating all the raid drives and even scsi 10rpm Quantum Atlas III. Over all drive index was 69.37MB/s and the random access speed was 10ms. The speed always plays a big role when it comes to data however, using these drives for storage or some sort of application would not make much of the difference in performance.

HD Tune Pro Read Test

To double check our benchmarks we went a step forward and performed two HD Tune tests, read and write. The average read speed of Constellation SATA was 72.6 MB/s with 149.7 burst rate and 9.9 ms access time. Not an eye opener but definitely matches our previous benchmarks.

HD Tune Pro Write Test

The write benchmark was done right after the read benchmark and the numbers were as follow. The average transfer rate was 65.3 MB/s with access time of 11.6 ms and burst rate of 149 MB/s. Very solid data for a 2.5 inch hard drive i might add.

Conclusion

It was a pleasure to review the Constellation series SATA hard drives by Seagate. While looking in the near future we can clearly see that the technology drives toward smaller and more compact systems. Keeping this in mind Seagate tries to concentrate on the Eco safe or Green technology with Constellation series. Where we had not had an opportunity to look at the SAS drives, SATA Constellation has performed very well under some of the major benchmarks in the reviewing community. We did not expected an eye opener in this situation and by the benchmark data these hard drives look very promising in the enterprise level. So where should you expect these drives to be uses? Well the possibilities are not endless as these drives do have a limit point. Some places where you can find these would be ATMs or a Video Servers, Blade Servers, Network routers in addition to some High Reliability systems such as government or military use. As we explore deeper in the Constellation series we find more and more technology, for the right use. I do strongly believe that Constellation SATA deserves a 9 out of 10. Keep up the good work guys!

Some pros we found:

Very quiet in idle and operation states.

High performance for Raid 1 SATA.

Uses less power than standard hard drives.

Perpendicular recording technology.

Some cons we found:

None that we could find.